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The quest for authenticity in political analysis from a truth-seeking warrior-scholarThu, 25 May 2017 18:38:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.12http://crusadeoftruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-LOGO-UNO-32x32.jpghttp://crusadeoftruth.com
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http://crusadeoftruth.com/anonymous-sources/#respondThu, 25 May 2017 18:38:31 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=416Following the decision by President Donald Trump to fire the belligerent head of the FBI James Comey, the mainstream media

Following the decision by President Donald Trump to fire the belligerent head of the FBI James Comey, the mainstream media began hemorrhaging articles that promised an impending impeachment. This frenzied media feeding over Comey’s figurative remains has hardly subsided in the week since his ousting, and there seems to be a surplus of microphones and video feeds recording academics, politicians, and Hollywood elites who are hysterically disenchanted with the conduct of the chief executive.

Having just exceeded 100 days in office, the Trump administration has been immersed in controversy since before Inauguration Day, when accusations of Russian meddling in the presidential election threatened to shake the electorate’s confidence in American democracy.

Since then, the most frequently cited source in Washington, D.C. is the the unnamed “senior White House official” who appears to be privy to just about every Oval Office discussion that has occurred in the preceding three months. Most recently, the Washington Post provides extremely intimate details derived from numerous mid-level and senior White House officials, including private conversations between staffers about future job prospects following fears of an impending impeachment. In fact, the only secret information the co-authors of the Washington Post exposé, Ashley Parker and Abby Phillip, appear to not be privy to is Trump’s tax returns and the nuclear launch codes.

Parker failed to respond to requests from Crusade of Truth to explain the improbable nature of her relationships with so many prominent executive officials, or elaborate on the newspaper’s policy for printing stories that entirely lack any credible sources,

Journalists can say anything–about anyone–so long as they credit an anonymous source.

Either Vice President Mike Pence experiences some cheap thrill from seeing his partner embarrassed and discredited, or these anonymous sources are of the same reputation as those that leaked the story of Trump’s sordid rendezvous with Russian prostitutes, with whom he performed such lewd acts as being urinated upon in a bed formerly occupied by the Obama family.

Despite the incredible nature of this story, the BBC was comfortable in printing the details of the then president-elect’s sexual adventures, relying upon unnamed sources within the CIA and other government agencies to support their claims. Even after discovering that the bawdy tale was commissioned by “an opposition research firm” and Democratic Party donors, the BBC and others were eager to report the story.

The BBC was apparently satisfied with the credentials of the investigators. “But these are not political hacks – their usual line of work is country analysis and commercial risk assessment…”

The allegations have since been firmly discredited.

The preference for anonymous sources whose often wild claims cannot be verified continued all the way up to Trump’s unapologetic firing of the FBI director. Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan, in describing the publication’s breaking news report on Comey’s ouster, believes that anonymous sources provide details to investigations that are actually preferential to information provided by public officials. The report relied upon the testimony of some 30 unnamed officials from the White House to the intelligence community to portray Comey’s firing as a scandalous act.

Sullivan explains the difficulty of using accredited sources to make very serious allegations of the POTUS. “There is no way to get at the story through talking to the White House press secretary or listening to the spin that is offered by officials who are willing to go on the record,” she told CBC News.

When in doubt, simply bludgeon the story into existence with brute force, soliciting anyone close to the government who is willing to speak off the record and without reprisal, regardless of their inherent political affiliation.

Such is the reality of a United States which is administered by a Washington outsider. From President Trump’s first day in the Oval Office, impeachment has been the plan.

Just six days after Election Day and 37 major newspaper publications across America were exploring the possibility of an early retirement for Trump. Academics and legal scholars from some of the most prestigious universities in the world attempted to persuade the public that, even months before Inauguration Day, Trump could legally be impeached. Perhaps the most authoritative among these sources is American University professor Allan Lichtman, famous for accurately predicting the last eight presidents, including Trump, using his proprietary formula. Even Trump voiced praise for the display of foresight by sending a congratulatory note to the professor, although this was likely without knowing that Lichtman’s latest prediction assumes that he will soon be impeached.

Votes were still being tallied in some states and establishment politicians were secretly plotting on how to remove the billionaire mogul and populist republican from the most powerful political position in the world.

Just one month into the Trump administration, and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi claimed that “there are plenty of grounds right now for the current president” to be impeached. However, proceedings would have to wait, according to Pelosi, because citizens “are not ready to accept the fact that their judgement may not have been so great in voting for him.”

Media Matters founder David Brock hosted an extravagant party attended by 100 of the wealthiest and most powerful liberal donors in America, circulating a secret memo explaining how liberals planned to take back America. The strategy focused on impeaching Trump, “monetizing political advocacy,” partnering with Facebook to censor “fake news” and otherwise initiating a tsunami of lawsuits and protests to retake America for the liberal establishment in a bloodless coup.

Today’s “fake news” recalls the “Yellow Journalism” which sensationalized stories and was popularly used around the turn of the 19th century.

In a surreal article appearing in the Atlantic, former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett looks back on the election and describes how reporters were noticeably shocked and consoling to their audiences after the unexpected Trump victory. The White House press conferences consumed with the size of the audience on Inauguration Day are also discussed in the article, before Lovett predicts that the Trump presidency will end in impeachment. All of these were events that characterized the first 100 days of the Trump administration–except that Lovett’s article was written in August of 2015.

Today, Google search the name “Trump” and the word “impeachment” will automatically be suggested. Google “Andrew Johnson” or “Bill Clinton,” two presidents who were actually impeached by the House of Representatives, and no such connection is made by the search engine.

With an array of choices, democratic lawmakers seem to simply be biding their time in selecting which Trump controversy to exploit to begin impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. The most immediately promising strategy appears to be pursuing claims that the Trump campaign was aware of Russian interference in the election. But with almost daily leaks from the media’s favorite new accomplice, the White House official speaking on conditions of anonymity, Americans can be sure that if there were a smoking gun in the Oval Office, they would already know all of the sordid details…

According to unnamed sources, no anonymous public officials were harmed in the drafting of this article.

Navigating the complex legal rulings that have stalled the Trump administration’s travel ban can be difficult. A litany of judges from numerous states have made separate rulings on the executive order, culminating in a hearing held before a 13 judge panel on Monday to decide the fate of the law. Determining exactly who is subject to the ban is equally trying, as a second version of the executive order was necessary to clear up the confusion that occurred at airports and customs agencies around the world over whom precisely the order targets. Even U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and Department of Homeland Security officials admitted confusion and uneven implementation of the order stemming from a lack of clear guidance. In some cases, lawful permanent residents were barred from entering the United States, and in others visa-holders entered the country without experiencing any delays.

However, one part of the order–or orders–has been exceedingly clear: the nations affected by the travel ban have been explicitly stated. Which is why it is so difficult to see how anyone could fail to understand the most elementary segment of the travel ban and suggest that Jesus would have trouble navigating U.S. customs.

Jesus was famously born in a stables in the Jewish town of Bethlehem. Using modern equivalencies, then, Jesus is a naturalized citizen of Israel. However, after King Herrod ordered the execution of all boys under the age of two, Jesus was taken to Egypt as a refugee, living in the North African country until it was safe to return to the Israeli city of Nazareth, where he incidentally lived out most of the years of his life.

I tried to return…but Trump stopped me at customs.

-Liberal Jesus

As an Israeli, Jesus most certainly would not be affected by President Trump’s travel ban proposal, though perhaps the author of the meme is implying that customs agents would be wary of a Middle Easterner as well-traveled as Jesus. The Messiah’s passport would, no doubt, include a number of colorful stamps indicating travel to terrorist havens across the region…or would it?

Jesus put quite a few miles on those sandals, ministering, preaching and healing in such exotic locales as Samaria, Jordan, Perea and Caperneum. As foreign as these names sound, the towns holding their names are all located within Israel proper and modern day Jordan. While Caperneum is near the Golan Heights, Israel captured this land from Syria in 1967 and has held the key terrain since as a means of defending itself from attack.

Christ also entered Lebanon, where the Christian Crier reports that, “His first miracle was performed in the city of Cana in South Lebanon, where he turned water into wine.” But a quick review of the executive order confirms that Lebanese travelers are not, in fact, banned from entering the United States.

Still, an overzealous border official–or the illustrator of this meme–may worry about Jesus’ potential ties to Muslim terrorists in Syria. After all, Mathew 4:25 reads, “Then the news about Him spread throughout Syria. So they brought to Him all those who were afflicted, those suffering from various diseases and intense pains, the demon-possessed, the epileptics, and the paralytics. And He healed them.”

However, the evangelist Mathew is referring to the Roman province of Syria, rather than the modern Arab Republic of Syria, which was founded after World War I. The RomanSyria Provincia included Judea and Galilee, the areas with which Jesus was most familiar, as well as a vast expanse of territory including Lebanon, Jordan, and much of modern Syria. Yet, much like Jesus Christ’s journey into a vast and intractable “Wilderness,” many of his journeys throughout modern Arab Syria are debatable, with some religious scholars contending that his travels were isolated within the modern borders of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.

Locations where the New Testament reveals that Jesus visited during his preaching, healing and ministering.

Of course, even if Jesus had visited Syria as it is situated today, the Trump travel ban does not bar anyone from entry into the U.S. for simply traveling through any of the six listed countries. The preceding historical account was executed simply to illustrate the imaginative leaps of rationality required for anyone to suggest that Jesus would be prohibited from entering the U.S. Even if the Messiah was regarded as a citizen of Syria, or any other country on the list, the inverse of the meme’s proposal is proven true from Trump’s original executive order allowing persecuted religious minorities to be given precedence when considering potential applicants for entry. Jesus certainly qualified as such during his own time, and any man residing in a Muslim majority country today and claiming to be Christ reincarnated is liable to be persecuted.

Travel ban version 2.0, when describing the redacted section regarding persecuted religious minorities, reads, “Executive Order 13769 did not provide a basis for discriminating for or against members of any particular religion. While that order allowed for prioritization of refugee claims from members of persecuted religious minority groups, that priority applied to refugees from every nation, including those in which Islam is a minority religion, and it applied to minority sects within a religion. That order was not motivated by animus toward any religion, but was instead intended to protect the ability of religious minorities — whoever they are and wherever they reside…”

Therefore, any Jesus meme reflecting the travel ban should say, “I tried to return, but judicial overreach resulted in the first travel ban being modified so that persecuted religious minorities like myself were no longer prioritized as refugees.” Ultimately, successive district courts have ruled that Trump’s travel ban is unconstitutional because of a single statement he made on the campaign trail 16 months ago calling for a “total and complete shut down of Muslims entering the United States.” The press frequently refer to the temporary travel restrictions as a “Muslim ban,” sharing with America’s judiciary the unique and uncanny ability to look into the president’s mind and determine his unspoken will. It is definitely ironic that a travel ban that the Left qualifies so adamantly as targeting Muslims would also include the Jewish/Christian Jesus Christ in this meme, effectively disproving the very reason that judges have subsequently struck down the executive order as unconstitutional.

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/trump-travel-ban-jesus-christs-return/feed/0http://crusadeoftruth.com/trump-travel-ban-jesus-christs-return/The Truth about academic jihad: the curriculumhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/e79JoB18NQc/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/truth-academic-jihad-curriculum/#respondTue, 09 May 2017 20:38:28 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=349­This is the second of three installments in a special report from Crusade of Truth exploring the alliance between Islam

]]>­This is the second of three installments in a special report from Crusade of Truth exploring the alliance between Islam and Western academia. The first part of this series may be found here, detailing the professors that make up the fundamentally radical substratum of academia. This installment focuses on the politicized curricula taught primarily in Middle Eastern studies and liberal arts courses, offering a revisionist, anti-Western education to the next generation of world leaders. The third and final installment functions to unify the effects of this extremist professorate preaching a stunted curriculum, and describes the outcome upon an impressionable student body.

The Curriculum

How do Western universities evolve from biased, politically entrenched institutions to veritable wellsprings of Islamic militancy–with little to distinguish them at times from the fundamentalist Islamic schools that give birth to unthinking martyrs and religious enforcers?

Male students at a Pakistani madrassa

Certainly, the socialist composition of collegiate faculty has a significant, sententious impact upon the student body, resulting in a politicized tuition that favors ideological conformity over factual precision. This activist approach to education produces some predictably recurring themes that form the framework for an historical perspective endorsed by academia that fits like a snugly wrapped turban with the narrative of the Middle East’s most violent jihadists. By theoretically accommodating the Islamist worldview, Western scholars have elected to endorse the multitude of injustices committed in the name of fundamentalist Islam, while concurrently weakening the ability of policymakers to contain them.

Poli-Academia

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from New York University and a proponent for ideological diversity on American campuses, says, “Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals.”

Critical peer review is what separates scholastic pursuits from journalism or politics, explaining the methodological differences between the Wall Street Journal and the Journal of International Business Studies. While a journalist should attempt to cover an event with a balanced analysis devoid of agenda, a scholar attempts to derive Truth from an event using the scientific process and is prepared to defend his or her findings before skeptical subject matter experts representing a diverse range of intellectual prejudices. Sadly, these requirements remain unfulfilled in many academic corners.

Presently, many universities are persuaded to form their curricula around the highly selective inclinations of the Middle East Studies Association. Franck Salameh of FrontPage Magazine describes this non-profit as a proponent for “the reductionist Arabist paradigm of Middle Eastern history championed by MESA’s leaders.” The association is often accused of exploring all of the region’s multifaceted issues within the singular prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Western imperialism.

Stubbornly immovable, the philosophy advocated by MESA is significant because it serves as an umbrella of intellectual authority for over 100 organizations.

Salameh explains, “Grants, appointments, promotions, publication, and one’s general workplace atmosphere are all affected by whether or not one is willing to submit to exponents of select historical perceptions and attitudes regarding the Middle East and its allegedly monolithic peoples and cultures.”

Cary Nelson, national president of the American Association of University Professors, understands all too well the career implications for criticizing Islam or supporting Israel, writing in 2010 that “faculty and students with sympathies for Israel encounter implacably pro-Palestinian attacks in multiple settings; these include departments where no candidates who has written in support of Israel in general or a two-state solution in particular would even be considered for a job.”

It appears that a professor challenging the status quo curriculum mandated by MESA is hardly different than a weather man that denies climate change; both of these dissenting professionals would be ostracized and ridiculed by their peers.

If there is any doubt that MESA is a front for Palestinian activism, rather than the non-political learned society of which its members claim to be a part, a recent campaign to amend the organization’s bylaws is informative. Membership voted to strike the term “non-political” from an article describing MESA’s “nature and objectives.” Advocates for the amendment claimed that removing the ban on partisanship was about academic freedom, or the ability to speak out against oppressive regimes across the world that target academics.

Twenty-year MESA veteran Elyse Semerdjian argues that, “We do this as an extension of our academic work in order to protect our workspace by speaking out on behalf of vulnerable colleagues who live and work in conflict zones. This work, which has come natural to us as an organization, certainly cannot be construed as apolitical.”

Other MESA scholars, like Neve Gordon, find the notion that scholarship should be detached from political activism absurd and unrealistic. He argues that there has never been “a time when politics and scholarship were separate. Or at least segregated.” To Gordon, the idea that education should be apolitical “is about as real and desirable as the idea of making America great again.”

However, the vote to remove the non-political association from MESA was not about academic freedom. In fact, the bylaw was amended for the express purpose of limiting academic scholarship from Israeli universities.

Ilan Troen, a Stoll Family Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University, says that the vote within MESA to embrace politicization is not about guaranteeing the academic freedoms of international scholars, but about denying and censoring pro-Israel voices. While professors in favor of boycotting Israel deceptively cite a number of reasons for the vote, Troen argues that the move is simply “to change the bylaws of an organization for one issue only — that’s supporting a Palestinian interpretation of a very complicated problem.”

MESA’s alignment with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is not surprising given that at least half of its members in 1992 were part of a growing number of Middle Eastern professionals joining the organization. This eventually turned MESA from a firmly non-partisan, conservative academic institution to a collective sounding board of like-mindedness for anti-Israel activism. Martin Kramer, president of Jerusalem’s Shalem College and a target of MESA’s academic boycott, explains: “It’s a last-ditch effort to assert the primacy of Palestine, by insisting that Israel uniquely deserves condemnation (in a Middle East mired in gross human rights violations), and that the Palestinians uniquely deserve sympathy (in a Middle East awash in refugees and suffering).”

Efforts to stifle pro-Israeli voices have already succeeded in pushing educators out of the departments governed by MESA and into specialized areas specifically covering Israeli studies in an arrangement that is emblematic of the hostile relationship fostered by MESA. Institutions of learning that are not inherently opposed to the very existence of Israel have been obliged to departmentalize the study of Israel into a unique focus independent from Middle Eastern studies, thereby disentangling themselves from the unscientific, politically-driven convictions of groups like MESA.

Political activism and partisan flag-waving is paradigmatic of the department of Middle Eastern studies, where scholastic integrity takes a back seat to an idealized subjectivity that is incapable of divorcing emotional sentiment from a rational analysis of the region and its people. What is truly incredulous is that scholars of the Middle East are perfectly content with designing their curricula to coincide with and support their admitted partiality.

Even more unsettling than the overtly biased nature of MESA scholarship, however, is the historical precedence that an intellectual boycott of Israeli academics seeks to emulate. The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in April of 1933 was only the beginning of an escalating series of reforms meant to target and isolate the Jewish minority living in Germany. The final product of these policies is well-known, especially to scholars and historians, yet this knowledge does not appear to have dissuaded educators from duplicating the same course of action as members of MESA.

A field of study comprised so thoroughly of imported intellectuals is liable to suffer from what Middle East analyst Lois Gottesman calls “clientitis,” or “an affliction that causes its victims [professors] to identify so closely with their clients (in this case, their objects of study) that they no longer can maintain any objective distance—and the need to curry favor with Arab governments in order to assure continued access to student visas, government archives and scholarship grants.”

The [INSERT NAME OF SAUDI PRINCE] School of Islamic Studies

It is no coincidence that numerous area studies programs receiving funding from these Arab Muslim states also enjoy the imprimatur of MESA. Many of these academic programs are funded by the Saudi government, the same institution which was shamefully complicit in funding and enabling the September 11th attack on America. While many of the details have been obscured behind an opaque wall of classified data, just last week 2,300 plaintiffs filed suit against the Saudi government, claiming that officials “intentionally aided, abetted and counseled al-Qaida.” Apparently, Saudi conspirators funneled payments to the skyjackers through nonprofits and charities established in the name of the royal family. These nonprofits and charities bear a striking resemblance to the Saudi donations accepted on behalf of educational institutions throughout the United States.

If examples of Saudi philanthropy aimed at enriching the educational experiences of American youth are plentiful, the controversies surrounding these donations are equally innumerable. The first of these was a $5 million donation from the Saudi royal family in 1993 establishing The King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies at Harvard Law School. Two other endowments aimed at advancing the study of Islamic law were soon to follow at Harvard, including the H.E. Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani Islamic Legal Studies Fund, as well as the Bakr M. Binladin Visiting Scholars Fund.

Saudi Arabia’s late King Fahd, patron and philanthropist concerned with education in America.

Saudi Arabian monarchs are not alone in their attempts to influence American perspectives on Islam. The United Arab Emirates gave $2.5 million to the Harvard Divinity School on behalf of President Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, compelling students to protest a donation originating from a president who also funded anti-American and anti-Semitic think tanks. Likewise, Harvard is not the only university to accept funds from such controversial sources. There is The King Abdulaziz Chair for Islamic Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, or The Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Program in Arab and Islamic Studies at Berkeley. Rice University, Duke University, Syracuse University, American University of Colorado, American University in Washington, D.C., and Howard University are among the prestigious institutions in the U.S. presently accepting Saudi Arabian cash for the furtherance of Islamic studies.

Faculty, administrators, and alumnus of these universities do not appear to be discouraged by the contentious nature of their donors, nor do they seem to be the least bit perturbed by the underlying motivations for these contributions. The official English-language Saudi newspaper Ain-Al-Yaqeen is proudly enthusiastic in its description of the royal family’s philanthropy: “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…has positively shouldered its responsibility, and played a pioneering role in order to raise the banner of Islam all over the globe and raise the Islamic call either inside or outside the Kingdom.”

Naturally, the Saudi royalty that bankroll these efforts are not so accessible in describing their goals in the U.S. However, the nature of the scholarship conducted at departments accepting Islamist charity betrays the goals of the fundamentalist Islamic nation. The Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University recently released a widely disputed, absurdly counter-intellectual report that attempts to connect the political rise of President Donald Trump with an commensurate rise in hate crimes aimed at Muslim Americans. The study relies upon uncorroborated media reports that indicate, to any degree, threats or assaults against Muslims derived purely from religious identity. Though most of these local news stories describe less harmful cases of “intimidation” against Muslim minorities, more serious offenses detailed in the Georgetown report are ridden with blatantly lazy errors and omissions. For instance, the robbery of a Muslim pizza delivery man was erroneously reported as a hate crime, despite local law enforcement never investigating it as such. In a remarkable number of cases, the social scientists at Georgetown mistakenly reported attacks against Sikhs or Hindus as Muslim hate crimes, either betraying an astounding lack for even the most elementary level of cultural fluency, or intentionally inflating incidences to produce a political response.

Universities are associating themselves with an infamous class of Islamist characters under the guise of fostering interfaith dialogue and a cultural exchange of values. One such character is none other than Osama Bin Laden’s brother, Bakr Bin Laden, whose Visiting Scholars Fund at Harvard Law School bears his name. The Bin Laden fund was ostensibly established to finance the importation of a “visiting scholar” from a predominantly Muslim country of origin to study at Harvard Law school. Two other U.S. colleges, Tufts University and Dartmouth College, also receive visiting scholars financed by the Bin Laden family. Comfortable in the knowledge that the Al-Qaeda leader was sufficiently estranged from the larger Bin Laden family, university administrators have had no qualms with accepting dozens of visiting Islamic scholars in the name of the Bin Laden family. Of course, Harvard Law School no longer publishes the identities of its visiting fellows, making it impossible to study their respective bodies of work for indications of radical Islamic influence.

Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn claims that the lack of transparency regarding the identity of visiting fellows is for safety considerations. ”It was done to prevent any kind of harassment and to allay any security concerns.” Translation: The Islamophobic American public cannot be trusted with this information.

The idea that a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship and the Bin Laden family are so acutely involved in importing foreign scholars to the U.S. is made even more scandalous when the Trump administration travel ban is considered. Indeed, in order for any court to render a decision on a case, the Constitution requires that the court have jurisdiction by proving that a plaintiff “has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that is either actual or imminent, that the injury is fairly traceable to the defendant, and that it is likely that a favorable decision will redress that injury.” The 9th Circuit Court, as well as other district courts, ruled that because universities around the country are suffering a financial and intellectual loss from the absence of Middle Eastern students and professors held up by the travel ban, states have suffered actual damages and the court has standing render a ruling.

The 9th Circuit Court’s decision reads, “Specifically, the States allege that the teaching and research missions of their universities are harmed by the Executive Order’s effect on their faculty and students who are nationals of the seven affected countries. These students and faculty cannot travel for research, academic collaboration, or for personal reasons, and their families abroad cannot visit. Some have been stranded outside the country, unable to return to the universities at all. The schools cannot consider attractive student candidates and cannot hire faculty from the seven affected countries, which they have done in the past.”

The court’s decision means that non-citizens who are in many cases tied to politicized, anti-American academic programs are now considered so vital to the economic interests of states that long-standing presidential authority may be usurped in their favor. So far, appellate courts have ruled to put a stay on the travel ban, creating the disgraceful situation whereby Bin Laden Visiting Fellows and Saudi-funded educational programs have compromised the ability of the president to execute his lawful mandate to guarantee national security.

Title VI Tricks

If MESA and the conglomerate of Islamist-funded educational endowments within U.S. universities has created an unholy axis of anti-Westernism, the U.S. government has become the unwitting third arm of this tripartite. This inconceivable arrangement is only made possible by the National Defense Education Act, Title VI of which sets aside resources for the pursuit of area studies programs. While private funding, such as the [INSERT NAME OF SAUDI PRINCE] School of Islamic Studies make up the majority of departmental funds available to educators, American citizens also contribute to Middle Eastern studies via taxes allocated for Title VI.

Initially established as a strategic byproduct of the Cold War, Title VI funds were appropriated largely for use in Soviet, Far East, and Latin Americans studies to contain the spread of communism. Gottesman describes the early mission of the NDEA “to create a pool of American scholars and experts focused on critical regions of the world whose expertise would help guide policymakers.” The Middle East did not figure prominently into national security discussions until the Arab-Israeli conflict turned into a perpetual crisis after the wars in 1967 and 1973, and the lack of American colonial experiences in the region certainly contributed to the deficit of meaningful scholarship. Subsequently, the pioneers of the early American departments of Middle Eastern studies, the first of which was established at Princeton University in 1947, were an eclectic range of both native-born Middle Easterners and European subject matter experts. These scholars maintained a reputation for impartiality and professionalism typical of mid-century American academia.

As the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict began to be defined more by Palestinian oppression and less by Arab hostility, and a generation of post-Vietnam activists began assuming roles as educators, the department witnessed a dramatic shift. At the same time, a 1978 book by Palestinian Edward Said titled Orientalism made harsh accusations of those that taught Middle Eastern studies, claiming that scholars in the field were the willing accomplices of an imperial government that sought to defame Islam while bolstering the Zionist cause. In 1965 Title VI became a part of the Higher Education Act which shifted the support for area studies away from purely national defense and foreign policy concerns to a wider pursuit of the advancement of international studies. These conditions combined to create a pendulous ideological shift in favor of protecting the oppressed Palestinian people, and as more Arab Middle Easterners entered the field of study as natural experts of the history and current affairs of the region, a decidedly anti-American, anti-Semitic discourse began to emerge. All the while, these partisan, ideologically entrenched institutions continued to receive Title VI funds from the federal government, so that allowances meant to pay for the advancement of intellectual manpower and international fluency were actually used to oppose American interests and denigrate American allies.

Efforts to reverse these paradoxical trends have been intolerably unproductive. The nature of the external governments that fund these programs, and the universally anti-American and anti-Israeli canonization contained within them has prompted U.S. lawmakers to mandate ideological diversity in classrooms that receive federal funding. In 2008, U.S. Congress was sufficiently concerned about the direction of area studies programs to impose standards on applicants receiving Title VI funding, mandating that they “reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views and generate debate on world regions and international affairs,” as well as encourage students to apply their expertise to government work, education, and nonprofit endeavors.

Despite attempts to implement controls, though, programs covering the Middle East continue to endorse radical ideologies. demonizing Israel and the West while working to portray Palestinians in a manner inconsistent with factual analysis. A study from AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit that documents and reports incidences of anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, examined the guests invited to speak at UCLA’s Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies. Even though Congress had already demanded that programs receiving federal funds maintain curricula free from political bias, the AMCHA Initiative found that UCLA was not compliant with legislator’s demands.

The University of California, Los Angeles is proud to be one of the greatest recipients of federal funding under Title VI. The Center for Near East Studies there is also one of the most frequent violators of the law designed to keep political bias out of education.

The report concluded that, “A large majority of the invited speakers at the events have demonized Israel and promoted boycott and divestment. One-third have compared Jews to Nazis, and one-third have condoned terrorism. The results indicate that CNES has a troubling anti-Israel bias, which distorts its scholarly and educational mission and is a violation of the funding requirements of Title VI of the Higher Education Act.” Some speakers met with and openly endorse Hezbollah. During the period of study, UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies received around $1.5 million in federal funding from Title VI.

As with any reform aimed at institutional change, without oversight the changes demanded by Congress are promised to fail. A report from the Louis D. Brandeis Center exploring the lack of oversight in collegiate institutions across America concluded that Title VI funds are a “national embarrassment,” and determined that, “Some programs were reportedly so hostile towards Israel that they would not even remotely entertain views that contradicted their unrelentingly anti-Israel perspective.”

Most significantly, the intellectual favoritism displayed for Islam and the plight of Arabs is not contained to classrooms at expensive, upper echelon universities. Public outreach programs encouraged by the NDEA have fostered the proliferation of professional development courses for K-12 teachers across America, ensuring that the Islamist narrative reaches young and impressionable audiences. While democratic lawmakers continue to stifle any Christian or Jewish influence from public schools under the guise of satisfying Constitutional mandates, Islam is given an amplified voice through the efforts of groups like the Council of Islamic Education. After President Bill Clinton produced education guidelines for Religious Expression in Public Schools with the help of the American Muslim Council, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the ACLU, Islamic teaching materials began flooding into America. While Nativity scenes and Christmas trees were effectively banned from public classrooms, students at one California elementary school were given cutting edge computer technologies which allowed them to “learn to become Muslim, recite the Quran, fast for Ramadan and pray Islamic prayers.”

Through expansive, Islamist-funded educational endowments at Western universities, the importation of a steady stream of “visiting fellows” of an unknown political persuasion, and the participation of an inadvertent accomplice in the U.S. government, pro-Islamist discourse is permitted to flourish unchallenged in the halls of learning. It is not the existence of critical analysis of the U.S. and Israel that should concern citizens, but the systemic disregard for opposing scholarly opinion to compete with these radical voices that is so troubling.

Curriculum of Cultivation

Within the department of Middle Eastern studies, Truth has been elusive because healthy skepticism is absent. By reading various university course descriptions detailing this program of study, it quickly becomes clear that a consensus exists among academia: the West is responsible for all of the social, economic, and cultural ills facing Islamic societies. In the name of power and profit, white colonialists have subordinated the Middle East and North Africa, and nearly every modern challenge facing the region can be tied back to this unequal relationship. The Zionist movement is the cumulative effect of these imperial designs made manifest at the cost of Palestinian self-determination. Ten to sixty years of varying degrees of Western involvement here has somehow become the most seminal event in nearly 1400 years of Arab Muslim ascendancy, including 400 years of Turkish imperialism that preceded European involvement in the region. So reads the syllabus of nearly every collegiate institution on the planet.

A graduate level course from the University of Maryland called “Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries” obeys this prejudiced formula, and students’ conclusions concerning the results of Western management of the Middle East are predicted: “Course lectures and the analysis and discussion of primary sources will lead students to understand that the peoples of the Middle East found answers to the challenges posed by Western dominance based on their specific historical, cultural and socioeconomic circumstances.” Once this program of indoctrination is complete, students will find the West culpable for the entire region’s instability, and threats like Islamism and terrorism are simply responses to challenges presented by outsiders.

Instructors like Dr. Hatem Bazian of Berkeley continue to indoctrinate their students with a purely one-sided analysis of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The course description for Bazian’s class, “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,” reads that it will “explore the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine.” Students may be sure that a course taught by a professor who has signed a petition which disavows the state of Israel, like 200 of his colleagues across the world, promises to offer a type of subjectivity that has no place within the halls of higher learning. Professor David Lloyd of the University of California, Riverside, sponsors a similar course, erroneously teaching his students that Israel actively practices apartheid against its Arab citizens.

Many universities publish course descriptions that have little in common with the actual course content. Students enrolled in classes taught by the assistant professor of Arab politics at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, have complained that their overzealous instructor used his academic pulpit to denounce or revile the state of Israel, regardless of the advertised purpose of the course. Sophomore student Bari Weiss described the atmosphere for the classes as “suffocating” and reported that a course on the history of the region was used purely to denigrate Israel. Other students recall being removed from Massad’s lectures for failing to recognize Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

“The course was supposed to be all about the Middle East,” Weiss said. “The amount of time he spent talking about Zionism or the Jewish nation or Jewish culture was inappropriate.”

Other bizarre narratives persist in the university setting. Scholars of Middle Eastern studies enjoy making cultural equivalencies between Islamic and Western societies during–and only during–the Middle Ages. Saint Xavier University’s course description for “Art in the Islamic World” says that, “Stress is placed on the Islamic world’s strategic role in the cultural exchange between East and West.” This is a peculiar way of describing the Islamic conquests which linked together Europe and Asia. A representation–to be sure–that is lacking for later globalizing linkages established by European nations in the region. Consequently, the golden age of Islam produces a distinctive explanation from scholars wherein civilizations subject to Muslim rule were fortunate to be subjugated by such a modernizing force as Islam. Students will surely learn that while Europeans were living in mud huts and worshiping plants, Muslim sages were divining complex algebraic equations on newly innovated reams of paper.

An enterprising liberal professor will no doubt cite the experiences of the Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan as evidence of Islam’s cultural superiority. Fadlan had this to say of his Viking hosts during a visit to the north in medieval times: “They are the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures: they do not purify themselves after excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impurity after coitus and do not even wash their hands after food.”

Professors enjoy pointing out that Europeans were barbarians next to Arabs some 1000 years ago

Crusading European knights making similar xenophobic descriptions of Arab Muslims are cited as evidence of the ignorance that allowed these barbarous invaders to commit genocide in the cities they conquered. Yet the comparison between Islam and the West is made to prove the fallacy that Middle Easterners lived in the most erudite, civil societies known to man before Europeans corrupted them through colonialism. Only the touch of the European man could wither and putrefy the very epicenter of civilization, or the world’s cultural high ground. This, despite centuries of internecine warfare and corrupt Ottoman mismanagement.

Syked Out

Academia’s insistence that Europe and the United States have wrecked the Middle East really originates with arguments made about the Sykes-Picot agreement. Named after the French and British diplomats who hammered out the deal, the revisionist consensus insists that it established a Middle East created in the image of Western profiteers and paid no heed to the ethno-sectarian rivalries that have existed in the region for centuries.

The result of this 1916 map-making endeavor, asserts the scholarly elite, is a contemporary Middle East in a perpetual state of war, where religious extremism competes with secular fascism, where the impossibly wealthy reign over the distressingly destitute.

If challenging this intellectual uniformity is no simple task for historians and social scholars, it is an impossibility for the incorrigible undergraduate. Writing for Foreign Policy, Steven A. Cook and Amr T. Leheta agree that, “The failure of the Sykes-Picot agreement is now part of the received wisdom about the contemporary Middle East.” Perhaps to demonstrate a fluency with regional history, or to recite the latest liberal talking points, Sykes-Picot has ventured from the classroom to the dinner party, from the textbook to the television.

Actual map used for the Sykes-Picot agreement. Notice that the zones of influence hardly coincide with the national boundaries decided upon at a later date

But to place the dismal fate of the entire Middle Eastern world squarely upon the shoulders these two European diplomats is to manufacture the ultimate historical strawman argument. Besides being principally unsound–it was the Treaty of Sevrès and the San Remo Conference that really established European zones of influence–conformist scholars deny that the political units and borders established by the victorious Allied powers after WWI obeyed historical prototypes.

To reduce issues as complex as those facing the modern Middle East, with all of its social, political and cultural intractability, to such simplistic terms as those pronounced by a defunct agreement like Sykes-Picot is to adopt a scholastic lunacy unsuitable for even the most introductory courses on the subject. Yet this curriculum persists despite a wealth of contradictory information.

Cook and Leheta agree, “Nor are the Middle East’s modern borders completely without precedent. Yes, they are the work of European diplomats and colonial officers — but these boundaries were not whimsical lines drawn on a blank map. They were based, for the most part, on pre-existing political, social, and economic realities of the region, including Ottoman administrative divisions and practices.”

An Ottoman Empire, it is worth noting, whose early successes were driven in large part due to a massive corp of Christian slave-soldiers.

White Man’s Burden

In 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling penned his bullheaded magnum opus poetically proclaiming the duty of white men in America to civilize the inferior races, “half devil and half child,” in a manner similar to that of the British Empire. Indeed, such xenophobic sentiments provided a perceived ethical impetus for Americans to involve themselves in a number of ill-conceived foreign adventures at the turn of the century. However, as the 20th century progressed and the Great War came to a close, a radical ideological transformation took place, introducing the concepts of self-determination and nationalism. Kipling’s illiberal limerick and the controversy it produced has outlasted the very imperial models he once promoted, so that decades after the cultural misappropriation of the 1800s, even the most selfless humanitarian commitments by Western nations were inappropriately condemned as instances of Western encroachment.

In any case, the established academic wisdom and the scholarly consensus regarding colonialism may be challenged by demonstrating how the European powers quickly looked for an exit strategy in a politically unstable region. For instance, a white paper by Dr. Toby Dodge of the University of London asserts that the British Mandate in Iraq, or the international authority for the U.K. to govern Iraq post WWI, created the conditions that permitted the rise of a Baathist military dictatorship in Iraq. The same report, though, mentions numerous facts that demonstrate the financial and political insolvency of such a strategy for Britain. By suppressing the 1920 revolt in Iraq, 426 British were killed, 1,228 were wounded, and another 615 were missing or taken prisoner.

Prime Minister David Cameron takes questions from students at Qatar University in Doha where he held a PM Direct event on the third day of his tour of the Middle East

Administering the newly formed nation-states within the Middle East was, in fact, frequently a fiscal and political burden for the European powers, not a source of capital for imperial states as suggested by revisionist historians. Mainstream academia insists that the entire Mandate system was instituted by the United Nations to advance the national interests of Western powers. Yet, Dodge notes that “within 12 years the British government had persuaded the League to recognise Iraq’s full independence. Britain had successfully divested itself of the very costly responsibility for Iraq’s creation.” British authorities found themselves perpetually challenged by a recalcitrant Iraqi legislature and an electorate that, first in the countryside by the peasantry and then among the urban elite, participated in mass violent uprisings to shrug off any semblance of foreign control, despite British involvement being limited to a simple advisory capacity by the middle 1920s.

The former European imperial powers could not operate with the same reckless impunity that they enjoyed in the 19th century. Dodge attributed this change to the new prominence of the nation-state as a political unit, as well as America’s newfound significance in the post-WWI international stage. President Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on the universal values of self-determination and national sovereignty prevented the imperial annexation of territory in Iraq that would have been permissible just decades earlier. However, professors are not making this distinction in the classroom, and many students graduate with the misconception that similar abuses to those committed in 19th century Africa and India occurred under the mandate system in the Middle East.

This is not to contend that the allied European victors of WWI acted without personal ambition in the Middle East; the French supervision of Lebanon and Syria was certainly conducted with stricter authoritative control than experienced under the British Mandate. David K. Fieldhouse, arguably the world’s foremost expert on economic imperialism, admits that the British allowed each ministerial position within the Iraqi government to be administered by local nationals, while the same posts within the French Mandate were occupied by French officials. Britain resolved to see Iraq awarded full independence on a strict timetable; France avoided firm commitments. Despite the despotic appearance of the French-Arab relationship, though, the status quo established under Ottoman rule was essentially preserved and class dynamics were left undisturbed by French officials. Since most Arabs living under Ottoman rule prior to WWI expressed loyalty to the empire, it is conceivable that the French preservation of Ottoman bureaucratic and aristocratic institutions was accepted with favor by the general public.

The French should also be credited with providing the social and civic foundations by which Lebanon would prosper despite its theologically diverse population. While some scholars, such as socialist activist Omar Hassan of the University of Sydney, Australia, criticize the colonial French establishment of “hierarchical communal relations of control and conflict that became entrenched in the social and political structures of Lebanon,” this arrangement has resulted in a relatively open and tolerant multisectarian society, conditions that could never be duplicated in other Middle Eastern nations composed of similarly diverse demographics. Lebanon today is governed via a confessional power-sharing arrangement between Sunni, Shiite and Christian factions–an unprecedented civic relationship that may not have been possible without early French stewardship.

Nevertheless, the scholastic consensus regarding the Mandate system insists that France and Britain were stimulated by purely selfish economic concerns. These beliefs are grounded in the principles of Leninist theory, a tempestuously popular ideology among the socialist and Marxist cornerstone of academia (see part 1 of this study). Vladimir Lenin argued that imperialism is just the highest evolutionary stage of capitalism, meant to subjugate an economically weaker people for the purpose of obtaining cheaper labor and resources. As a consequence, Marxists and Islamists make congenital confederates, forming an impenetrable intellectual bulwark within university settings.

John A. Hobson, another prolific critic of imperialism often cited by academic specialists, insisted that unscrupulous, faceless financiers worked tirelessly to extract profit from new territory at the expense of the colonized, without considering any purpose for these ventures outside of financial gain.

Vladimir Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Hobson denies the possibility of any virtuous motives for these commercial enterprises. He wrote that, “In the mouth of their representatives are noble phrases, expressive of their desire to extend the area of civilisation, to establish good governments, promote Christianity, extirpate slavery, and elevate the lower races. Some of the business men who hold such language may entertain a genuine, though usually a vague, desire to accomplish these ends, but they are primarily engaged in business, and they are not unaware of the utility of the more unselfish forces in furnishing their needs.”

The theories upheld by thinkers like Hobson and Lenin have become popularized and mentioned as matters of fact beyond debate among the professorate. Indeed, Fieldhouse agrees that any dissenting voices are inaudible above the din of congruent, back-slapping approval from academic elites. He posits, “Hobson’s own claim to importance and originality lies simply in his having induced British, and subsequently world, opinion to accept his own special definition of the word imperialism.”

This definition is decidedly simplistic and altruistic, and relies upon great leaps of rationality and scholastic conformity to convince students at regular academic intervals that the entire Middle East was born from some obscure financial conspiracy. Any of the numerous positive outcomes that resulted from European supervision of the Middle East, as Hobson suggests, were accidental or motivated by political profit.

For Marxists, however, positive consequences resulting from the pursuit of wealth are made immoral by the procurement of commercial interests. Hobson’s unsound analysis of imperialism, first published in 1902, has dominated academic discourse since its inception, creating an anti-Western consensus with enough intellectual tack to become permanently affixed as a matter of historical fact. Again, Fieldhouse explains, “His conception of the nature of ‘imperialism’ has, indeed, been almost universally accepted and, partly through the expository literature it has generated, may be said to have exercised a significant historical influence.”

Anti-Semitism 101

Academia’s faulty conclusions regarding the mandate system in the Middle East extends to misconceptions regarding the establishment of Israel. Pro-Palestinian professors–or simply professors–consistently cite the Balfour Declaration as evidence of Western Zionist sympathies. In 1917, this document declared Britain’s support for a national homeland for diaspora Jews in Palestine. However, the irony is that this support was predicated on an anti-Semitic miscalculation.

Like many anti-Semite conspiracists, British imperials wrongly judged that Jews were the behind-the-scenes managers of world events, using their great wealth and influence to direct policy in the U.S. and Russia. This bigoted typecasting was actually used in WWI Britain in a misguided attempt to please Jewish figures in America and Russia, whom Balfour and company wrongly estimated could entice their representatives in power to support the Allies. In the case of the U.S., the theory held that the Zionists could help draw the Americans into the war at a most critical juncture, while Russian Jews could be made to keep the Bolsheviks engaged in the war on the precarious Eastern front. In any event, it was hardly pro-Zionist fervor which enticed His Majesty’s Government to produce the Balfour Declaration, dismissing the very basis of many pro-Palestinian arguments which claim that Israel was only established and perpetually supported thereafter by Europe’s ideological preference for the Zionist cause.

An industrious historian need only study what prominent British statesmen involved with the Balfour Declaration were saying at the time to adopt an appreciation for the parsimonious nature of Britain’s commitment to Zionism, starting with Lord Balfour himself, who is remembered for saying, “I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.”

Sir Mark Sykes, the diplomat whose name is now enduringly tied to the fate of the Middle East also had an anti-Semitic appreciation for Zionism. He once described Jewish political influence as “atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken.”

Conclusively, if there is any doubt that such bigotry permeated the highest echelons of British policy-making, Prime Minister David Lloyd George once called a Jewish colleague “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.”

British imperial policy was not concerned with maligning Arab Muslim interests in the region in favor of Zionism. Rather, the primary goal of the British regarding the Palestine Mandate consisted of keeping the territory out of the control of its international adversaries, as well imperial competitors like France, and keeping trade routes open to India. None of these conditions required the oppression of Palestinians.

Many of the national boundaries within the Middle East which persist today, including Palestine, may be attributed to a series of correspondences between Sharif Husayn of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner of Cairo whom the British government trusted with negotiating with potential Arab insurrectionists during WWI. McMahon provided certain territorial assurances to Husayn in exchange for the promise of an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Much of the contemporary academic debate surrounding the McMahon-Hussein correspondences centers around the translation for a cognate word, or a word with different meanings in both Ottoman and Arabic, that could mean either “province” or “environs.” The exact implication of the word would determine whether McMahon was promising Palestine to his erstwhile Arab ally or not.

The predominate academic viewpoint, of course, is that Palestine was a “twice promised land” and the subject of an unethical foreign policy blunder, promised to Arab Ottomans by imperial Britain for the express purpose of exploiting military and material support, despite British officials pledging contradictory assurances to the Zionist movement. Fortunately, historian Isaiah Friedman was granted unprecedented access to historical records of the McMahon-Husayn correspondences, as well numerous supporting documents, and he was thus able to challenge the established academic consensus which indicted British colonialists for decades of Arab-Israeli conflict. Not only does Friedman make convincing arguments that McMahon willfully and intentionally excluded Palestine from the territories being offered to Husayn, but he effectively repudiates the purpose for any linguistic or territorial debate altogether by proving that “the British, as well as the Allies, committed themselves merely to recognize and uphold Arab independence in the areas liberated (from the rule of the Ottoman Empire) by the Arabs themselves.” Therefore, since Sharif Husayn and his loyalists never liberated Palestine from Ottoman rule, the Arabs had no legitimate claims to Palestine.

Following post-war negotiations and League of Nations approval, the occupying British sought to legislate the Palestinian territories with an even-handed approach that, at times, cast doubt on the very spirit of the Balfour Declaration. As the British administered the Palestinian Mandate, officials consistently passed laws to limit Jewish immigration into what would eventually become the state of Israel, while asking Syrian and Jordanian customs agents to ignore the massive influx of Arab immigration into the region.

Neighboring Arab Middle Easterners were attracted by the prosperity generated from Jewish settlement, and they would often set up communities on the outskirts of Jewish neighborhoods in order to share in the economic stimulus. In 1939, Winston Churchill said, “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.”

Neville Chamberlain is noted for his Arab preference. Chamberlain told his cabinet that “If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.” British sponsorship of Palestinian interests, though, are regularly unexplored in academic and political circles.

Similar to the Mandate for Iraq, maintaining a presence in Palestine came with far more costs than compensatory advantages for Britain. In 1936, after receiving monetary donations from Nazi Germany, the Arabs rioted and British soldiers were used to keep the peace.

An illuminative means for understanding the extent of bias informing Western curricula on the Arab-Israeli conflict may be grasped by reviewing Israeli primary school textbooks. After Leftist victories in the Israeli Knesset before the turn of the millennium, Israeli textbooks were drastically altered to coincide with historical narratives taught by Western academics of the typical liberal persuasion. Historical accounts became exceptionally sympathetic to Palestinian and Arab versions of events, despite the flaws inherent to them.

Eyal Naveh, professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv, is among the “new historians” who count themselves as being more objective for their emotional separation from the seminal events of Israel’s founding for not taking part in them. Bolstered by recent political victories from Israel’s Left, the “new history” teaches that Israel actually held the advantage when it was attacked simultaneously by all of its Arab neighbors, recounts that the Israelis forcibly expelled the Palestinians after claiming independence, and focuses on an isolated massacre carried out by Jewish radicals which occurred at the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Most importantly, though, these new historians are teaching that any other narratives previously espoused by Israeli historians should be called “myths,” and relegated to discussions of wartime propaganda.

The Israeli New History was introduced to classrooms once a liberal majority took control of the Knesset

The profound institutional changes that have occurred within Israeli classrooms at the behest of liberal academics are best exemplified by passages from two Israeli textbooks. The first, a popular history text used in 1984, describes the 1948 war between Israel and the Arab world as such: ”The numerical standoff between the two sides in the conflict was horrifyingly unbalanced. The Jewish community numbered 650,000. The Arab states together came to 40 million. The chances of success were doubtful and the Jewish community had to draft every possible fighter for the defense of the community.”

Contrast this with the new historian’s account: ”On nearly every front of and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment and also in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle.”

New history critic Aharon Megged dislikes this gargantuan shift in perspective. “Why not just translate the Palestinian books for our children and be done with it?” he asks.

However, Megged lacks an appreciation for the utter revulsion and anti-Semitism present within the pages of Palestinian school books. Even mathematics is conducted in a sadistic manner among Palestinians and their coreligionists throughout the Middle East. According to Republican Newt Gingrich, “They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?’”

Clearly, the answer for many Palestinians is “too many.”

A study that compared school text books among Palestinians and Israelis found that the former portrayed Jews negatively a full 84 percent of the time. The same study attempts to establish that both Israelis and Palestinians use negative, bigoted terminology in their text books, but this unfair conclusion is only possible by comparing ultra-Orthodox Jewish school texts with mainstream Palestinian school books. When textbooks from secular, public Israeli schools are examined, where 70 percent of Israeli children go to school, the results are incomparable.

Israel’s Islamist neighbors are no more gracious in their descriptions of the Jewish state or other non-believers. Year after year, primary school textbooks in Saudi Arabia are roundly condemned for teaching hateful bigotry via odious lessons which start as early as the first grade and culminate in 12th grade lessons instructing Saudi teens on how to properly wage jihad against infidels. The Saudi government commissioned a study in response to international condemnation for this perverse curriculum, eventually admitting that their own education system “encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.'”

After promising reform on numerous occasions, local teachers and activists continue to smuggle out revised textbooks from Saudi Arabia that offer the same genocidal tuition.

Subsequently. peace between the Palestinians and Israelis has been so elusive primarily as a result of the “Right of Return,” or the status of diaspora Palestinians and their offspring which were, in one manner or another, displaced from their homeland after Israel declared statehood in 1948. Revisionist accounts of the Arab exodus from Israel vary in their audacious extremity, with some academics insisting that Israel orchestrated a deliberate campaign to ethnically cleanse their new homeland of Arabs, while the more moderate position is one that conceives of numerous reasons for the withdrawal–both compulsory and voluntary. Though even Israeli instructors are succumbing to pressure from New Historians to concede that Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in 1948, another narrative exists that is vastly minimized in Western scholarly circles: Palestinians were ordered by local and external Arab political and Islamic leadership to abandon their homes.

Radical scholars are part of a massive pro-Palestinian faction of politicians, jihadists and social activists who seek to arbitrarily assign mythological, conspiratorial motives to the Israeli state for the mass Palestinian exodus that accompanied Israeli independence. One of the most prolific New Historians is Benny Morris, who has at moments accused the Israeli state of perpetrating the mass Palestinian exodus via heavy handed tactics. However, as historian Efraim Karsh–one of Morris’ greatest critics–explains, there are numerous reasons to call the New Historians’ perceptions into question. Besides contradicting himself more than once (Morris in 2004: “When an armed thug tries to murder you in your home, you have every right to defend yourself, even by throwing him out.”), Karsh explains how Morris’ scholarship “reverts to the problematic technique of relying on a small number of Zionist statements either taken out of context or simply misrepresented.”

Like a host of pro-Palestinian pundits, Morris makes weak attempts to describe the Palestinian exodus as a premeditated act that was a fundamental part of Zionist ideology. However, archives demonstrate that the antithesis is true: early Jewish leaders were worried about the capacity of Israel to absorb millions of new Jewish immigrants because supplanting indigenous Arab Palestinians was never meaningfully explored. A multitude of original sources from the era demonstrate that there was no large-scale plan to supplant to Palestinians. In fact, the inverse is proven by media sources from the time demonstrating that Arab leadership actually encouraged Palestinians to forfeit their homes for the coming battle.

Globally, educators are surely influenced by this debate occurring within Israeli classrooms. As Israeli historians and scholars surrender or nullify their documented accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to satisfy the partisan revisions of the Left, academia at large is emboldened and encouraged to adapt their own curricula to satisfy the Arab narrative. If the Israelis do not pursue the eradication of fictional revisionist history from their own classrooms, there can be no doubt that liberal academic institutions the world over will swiftly and completely adopt pro-Palestinian fantasies devoid of any serious attempts for impartial review.

The New Neocolonialism

The exploitative injustices committed by the seaborne empires of Europe prior to WWI have been slow to fade from global consciousness. Certainly the institutionalization of these policies by Western legislators, and the celebration of this expansion as a sort of racial mandate helped cement the perception of distrust that the international community presently holds for any example of Western foreign intrusion. The new neocolonialism, as implied by prominent academics, is any attempt by Westerners to send any aid or assistance of any kind to former colonial states. Even remarking on injustices occurring in the Third World is perceived as a racist disregard for indigenous citizens to solve their own problems.

The late Kwame Nkrumah, the one-time socialist prime minister of Ghana and, naturally, a life-long academic of Western tuition, described the difference between “naked colonialism” and post-WWI neocolonialism. “This means, so it [the modern imperialist] claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’, which has come to be known as neo-colonialism.”

So, as academia suggests, any act of human kindness from Western nations should be recognized as an attempt to marginalize a former colony for the express purpose of plundering wealth from third world inhabitants. Even attempts by Western academics to monumentalize by publication the historical narrative of the colonized is seen as woefully insufficient due to the presumed privileged status of the Western author. Graham Huggan of Harvard University argues that the Anglocentric nature of postcolonial discourse occurring in the West, however sympathetic and anti-imperialist this conformity may be, is “intellectually bankrupt” because of the scholars’ inability to understand the native tongue of the colonized. Even attempts to find authentic voices by importing indigenous writers for a genuine postcolonial perspective, as Huggan claims, is a suspect endeavor since Western publishing houses will market such literature to a Eurocentric “reading public” that retains certain myths about the exotic, otherly nature of subjugated peoples. In this manner, Westerners are not only incapable of commenting on the subject of neocolonialism, but they are also poorly equipped to even read about colonial experiences from colonial voices as a result of their cultural ineptitude.

Of course, the logically circuitous nature of this thinking, whereby Westerners find themselves incapable of remarking on or even digesting information related to the plight of the disenfranchised, has consequences outside of academia. In response to Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army’s genocidal campaign through northern Uganda, American nonprofits and media outlets awakened a massive social media response by documenting and publicizing the kidnappings, rapes, and murders perpetrated by Kony and his henchmen. Inexplicably, after a generous outpouring of charitable support and social media sympathy, many African intellectuals felt that the humanitarian response from the West was just an extension of colonialism.

Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole was offended by U.S. assistance for Ugandans, describing a charity meant for children as part of the “White Savior Industrial Complex.”

Ugandan-American activist TMS Ruge was irate at the attention his neighbors received from the West, calling the online Kony campaign meant to build international awareness on the genocide in his country a “fund-raising stunt.” Ruge and other African activists were upset at the perception of helplessness that prevails for Africans, interpreting Western concern as an extension of colonialism. He said in his blog that, “We as Africans, especially the diaspora, are waking to the idea that our agency has been hijacked for far too long by well-meaning Western do-gooders with a guilty conscience, sold on the idea that Africa’s ills are their responsibility.”

These African academics influence the way that Western professors interpret events in the Middle East, creating a scholarly consensus for Western isolation from military endeavors in places like Libya and Syria. Their theses rest not upon any practical strategic considerations, but rather upon a firm belief that Western intervention, despite humanitarian needs on the ground, is a counterproductive extension of imperialism.

Opposition to American military intervention proliferates college campuses. A University of Wisconsin professor cancelled his classes in protest of Operation Iraqi Freedom, prompting students to request a refund for their tuition.

Faculty at Irvine Valley College in Southern California cried censorship when administrators sent out a memorandum requesting that professors remain neutral on the topic of the war in Iraq, keeping lectures relevant to course materials. When the faculty persisted in their outrage, college leadership revealed that the request came from the student body.

At Amherst College, students were forced to witness the spectacle of 40 of their professors parading into their normally serene dining hall with anti-war signs. In at least one instance, student and teacher came to blows over the chaotic interruption.

Anything but Islam

European attempts to build a new Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, then, are an inadequate explanation of modern day challenges confronting the region. Cook and Leheta provide an alternative possibility that remains undiscussed in most classrooms. “The conflicts unfolding in the Middle East today, then, are not really about the legitimacy of borders or the validity of places called Syria, Iraq, or Libya,” they argue. “Instead, the origin of the struggles within these countries is over who has the right to rule them.” And with increasing frequency, Islamists are proclaiming their rights to authority. From established Islamic regimes in places like Pakistan and Iran, to emerging theocratic experiments in Egypt and Tunisia, the pan-Islamist movement is perhaps in an infantile stage.

Students of Bazian, the incompetent clod of a professor who likened Trump’s election victory and Brexit to the rise of white nationalism, will learn that the disarray experienced throughout the Arab Muslim world is a product of Westernization. “You created your colonial box and you need to clean it yourself,” demands the obtuse professor of the country that welcomed him.

If colonialism is the problem, Islam is the answer. Increasingly, Islamic fundamentalism is provided as an answer to the political collapse of past governments in the Middle East. Arabs first failed to organize around nationalist sentiments, and after a brief experiment with pan-Arabism in the 1960s, political Islam was offered up as a legitimate response to the challenges facing the Middle East.

Yet American professors refuse to acknowledge a religious link to any contemporary crises. With remarkable acuity, deputy director for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Oren Kessler exposes the absurdity of this refusal:

“The conflicts of the Middle East aren’t about religion. Jihadist violence? Garden-variety criminality, the president says. Young people flocking to ISIS?’ ‘Thrill-seekers,’ posits the secretary of state, who are desperate for ‘jobs,’ per a State Department spokeswoman. Iran’s belligerence? A reaction to ostracization, a former embassy hostage insists. Sunni-Shiite bloodletting? Jockeying for power, the pundits conclude.” The refusal to properly identify what motivates a threat simply grants it permission to persist unmolested.

Perhaps that is what has earned President-elect Trump the ire of so many academics (see part I of this report); he is willing to denounce Islamic fundamentalism and define America’s enemies.

Professors will always find the link between religion and political policy uncomfortably elusive. It is counterintuitive, after all, for a scientific thinker to reduce an argument to its spiritual essence. It is even more upsetting for a liberal visionary to point the finger at someone else’s religion as the cause of something ugly. Kessler agrees that “scrutinizing specific religious doctrines remains one of the last great taboos, all the more so when the faith in question is the supposedly non-white creed of Islam.” In the liberal victimhood culture of America that celebrates ridiculously delicate, emotionally sensitive personal outrage, such criticism is socially prohibited.

Writing for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood precisely captures the reluctance of Westerners to cite the theological origins for violent behavior in a piece . He believes that the chronological distance within Christian civilizations for any comparative religious upheaval resulting is schismatic violence is what prohibits the condemnation of jihadists for Western thinkers. Wood writes that, “In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.”

Wood continues, “Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.” Without a doubt, this bias is pervasive in university settings, prompting the subsequent misinterpretation of the causes of a number of social and political challenges threatening the region.

Indeed, this baseless assessment is what permits a hypocritical set of contradictions to exist, such as championing the cause of homosexuality whilst concurrently forgiving mainstream Islam for human rights abuses against the same people. The recent Women’s March on Washington and their ignorance of the plight of women in fundamentalist Islamic societies epitomizes this contradiction of ideology. Or the widespread condemnation and Justice Department prosecution of private enterprises that refuse to do business with homosexuals that is starkly contrasted with the deafening silence for the treatment of the same behavioral minorities at the hands of Islamist governments throughout the Middle East.

Absent from the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. were any signs decrying the oppression of Muslim women.

Yet public policy and Islam are permitted to coalesce into one by academia on the occasions when Islam is monumentalized. For instance, Harvard’s Islamic Legal Studies Program is providing generous resident fellowships in order to study Sharia law and generate the means to secure its implementation into U.S. policy. The pioneering Sharia Research Fellowship Program will provide the cash, facilities, and research tools to study the Islamic case law and fatwas that address a veritable alphabet soup of liberal issues: minority rights, climate change, Islamophobia, refugee studies and animal rights. Noticeably lacking from the discourse is any study of terrorism, radicalization, honor killings, gender studies and family law, or the myriad of issues that truly and urgently need addressed within Muslim communities and are in some way presided over by the dictates of Sharia law.

Discussions concerning Islam and violence, whether terrorism, patriarchal domination, or present day sectarianism, are called responses to Western intrusion or stifled outright. Max Fisher, writing for Vox, is right when he says, “No one who seriously studies the Middle East considers Sunni-Shia sectarianism to be a primarily religious issue.” Fisher subsequently offers a medley of Western stimuli for modern day conflicts that have torn the Middle East asunder since the Islamic schism and have persisted today in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran…It would be far more efficient to describe the places where sectarianism does not currently reside, however, and to dismiss the religious link to sectarian conflict is to ignore not only history but the very words of the Sunnis and Shiites presently engaged in such warfare.

The refusal by Leftist professors to place any accountability for the state of the Middle East on Islamists is best exemplified by an address from Georgetown University professor Tamara Sonn to fifty of her colleagues at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. At the event, Sonn dismissed Islam as a political force in opposition to the West by asking, “How can an ancient, global religion be an enemy of a modern geopolitical construct?” Of course, the very existence of Islamic regimes and Islamic political bodies like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas dispute the terms by which Sonn defines the conflict between Islam and the West.

Sonn continued with her dubious assessment of Islam, using a Venn diagram to illustrate how jihad is a mostly nonviolent construct. Sonn, like many in academia, dispute the definition of jihad supplied by most Arab-speaking Islamic jurists as meaning warfare in the name of religion. Dismissive of these claims, Sonn argued that jihad is a personal, nonviolent struggle, and only “a tiny part of it is military effort under specific circumstances controlled by Islamic law.”

Jihad, like any religious precept, must be evaluated both by what has been written on the subject in legal treatises and how believers actively observe it. In both instances, as David Cook explains in Understanding Jihad, it is impossible to ignore the martial utility of jihad. While there is certainly evidence, both historically and functionally, of an inner, purely spiritual jihad among Muslims, to ignore as Sonn and Western Muslims do the traditional concept of jihad as a holy war is executed “to distance themselves and their religion from association with violence and conquest…” for the purpose of “‘external consumption.'”

In other words, the violent nature of jihad is ignored by Western Muslims and their apologist allies within academia because violent jihad is morally incompatible with Western values. The exigencies of political activism from the classroom outweigh any desire by some professors to apply even the most rudimentary analytical standards to their research.

Dr. Craig Considine of Rice University is renowned as a Muslim apologist for his lazy, uncritical efforts in searching out moral equivalencies between Islam and Christianity. Considine’s quest to establish this ethical parity is accomplished only by omitting key passages of the Quran, ignoring Islamic jurisprudence, and disputing the findings of contemporary Muslim jurists.

In a “New Perspective of ‘Jihad’ in Christianity and Islam,” Considine echoes the contentions of his colleagues in academia when he argues that “‘jihad’ has several different components, which include personal struggles, such as the struggle against an addiction; social struggles, such as the struggle to become tolerant of others; and occasionally a military struggle, if and when necessary in self-defense.” To support this narrative, Considine completely absolves himself of any scholarly responsibility for considering context.

By recognizing the martial aspect of jihad as a rarely conjured, pacifistic response to external aggression, Considine succeeds in perpetuating a scholastic lunacy that is as easy to dispute as it is common among his academic peers. The Rice professor cites an obscure, oft-disputed remark by Mohammed in which the prophet responds to a question asking which form of jihad is the greatest by answering, “The jihad of the self,” or the internalized struggle against the personal self.

First, as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org asserts, this citation is derived from a hadith, or an Islamic tradition inspired by the words and deeds of Mohammed, known as ‘Umdat al-Salik or Reliance of the Traveler. This particular text, according to Spencer, is not a part of the reliable collection of six hadiths studied by Islamic jurists for their consistency and reliability. Additionally, many of the greatest Islamic interpreters of the modern age note how Reliance of the Traveler is preoccupied by many pages relating the sanctity of martial jihad, while devoting a single paragraph to the supposedly “greater” jihad. These same jurists of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, perhaps the most prestigious school in all of Sunni Islam, produced an authoritative manual on Islamic law stating that “lesser jihad may indeed be lesser in name,” though it “nonetheless exists, and is often given greater attention in Islamic jurisprudence than its supposedly greater counterpart.”

Even if one discounts expert analysis and the validity of hadith sources concerning the lesser and greater jihad, the Quran itself must be explored as the primary source for Truth among Muslims. The Quran is clear regarding the merits of martial action in 4:95: “Not equal are those believers remaining [at home] – and the mujahideen, [who strive and fight] in the cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives. Allah has preferred the mujahideen through their wealth and their lives over those who remain [behind], by degrees. And to both Allah has promised the best [reward].”

Bashi-Bazook with hookah, 1877, Stanislaw Chlebowski (1835–1884)

Conveniently, professors of Middle Eastern studies spend very little energy actually studying the primary source of Islamists and terrorists, or the Quran, preferring instead to revert back to the colonial narrative. To Sonn, even groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are acting purely in self defense. She told her little audience of sympathetic academics that “terrorists believe their anti-West campaigns are defensive, because they believe that the West is at war with Islam.”

Esposito, militant Islam’s darling within American academia and the head of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, adds his own preposterous theories to the echo chamber: “…most fundamental and important is the recognition that widespread anti-Americanism among mainstream Muslims and Islamists results from what the United States does—its policies and actions—not its way of life, culture, or religion.”

Collegiate instructors have long attempted to describe the conflict between Islamists and the West in terms of resistance by the weak and subjugated against the all-powerful. Islamists are viewed by Sonn as peaceful community organizers. Sonn asked her audience, “Any of you who have ever tried to be a community organizer, do you know how hard that is day-in, day-out?” Without a doubt, Sonn’s sympathy for the community organizer betrays her own radical approach to scholarship as an overzealous activist first and social scientist last.

She went on to claim that jihadists are “pitching their message to the marginalized underclass, the unemployed, and especially those who feel rejected by the mainstream.”

Therefore, jihadists and terrorists are simply the victims of globally systemic inequalities, forced to live in utterly dismal conditions in a post-colonial world where violent resistance is a natural and even heroic means of engaging an asymmetrically superior foe. Within this suppositional space, even the most unhinged jihadist enjoys an intellectual communion with the activist-professor by way of their malformed geopolitical worldviews.

Middle Easterners could not possibly be motivated to violence by something as crude and irrational as sectarianism or religious mandate, collegiate instructors argue. Yet, somehow, Americans are the perpetrators of the same base discriminatory tactics to which Muslims are immune from committing. Indeed, was it not racism and xenophobia, argues the Left, that resulted in the election of Donald Trump? Isn’t Islamophobia on the rise in America, according to CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center, because of hateful ideologies expressed by white racists? Apologist professors are in the absurd position of arguing that many Americans are capable of bigotry and religious discrimination, while the groups that are actually killing each other in the name of Islam do so for purely secular, prudent reasons.

Subject Matter Amateurs

Academic subjects outside the purview of international affairs also tend to overlap with and inform the debate on Middle Eastern studies, since nearly all humanities-driven scholastic programs share socialist theory and distinct criticism of U.S. foreign policy as a fundamental ideological prerequisite. Therefore, a student need not study the Middle East to emerge from college with a stunted understanding of it. Professors from a limitless number of fields share a counterfactual understanding of the region immersed in a collective partisan worldview. Berkeley professor of comparative literature Judith Butler exemplifies the interdisciplinary union among academia that permits a lesbian Marxist feminist like she to be received as an expert social commentator on the Middle East.

Butler teaches a trending Leftist philosophy called “intersectionality theory” that essentially assumes universal consistencies between oppressed homosexuals and minorities and the exploitation of Arab Muslims. From the perspective of Butler (and the loyal feminist students interacting with her curriculum), U.S. and Israeli policy exerts patriarchal, white supremacist controls that are systematically present in all civilizations at once, in some sort of grand, unifying federation of oppression. It is easy to see how such a principle compels solidarity between, for example, an African American woman and a Palestinian jihadist; intersectionality theory implies that minorities subject to entirely different social circumstances should unite around their mutual contempt for the majority. Such a doctrine, by its appearance in a diverse set of academic frameworks seeks to institutionalize division–be it a polarity of class, race, or gender–and ultimately demonize the West.

Intersectionalist theory is not simply relegated to the radical fringe of academia, with many professors embracing this malicious “us versus them” philosophy. George Mason University professor and Palestinian rights lawyer Noura Erakat was featured as a panelist in a Black History Month event at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. During the discussion on “intersectional solidarity,” Erakat attempted to make absurdly immaterial connections between, for example, allegations of police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri and the plight of Palestinians. Never mind that the U.S. Justice Department and other independent investigators found that the Ferguson police officer who shot Michael Brown was justified in doing so, or that Israeli citizens have been rewarded for returning Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 with a veritable firestorm of Qassam rockets and the political ascendancy within the Palestinian Authority of an internationally condemned terrorist group. The only intersectionality here, between Black Lives Matter and Hamas, is the sharing of contrived grievances.

Similar to Professor Sonn of Georgetown, Erakat whipped her sympathetic crowd into a frenzy by identifying herself and her audience as activists. “How many here identify as activists?” she asked.

After the crowd responded appropriately with enthusiastic applause, Erakat made her own agenda clear: “I’m an activist,” she claimed, just as Sonn acknowledged her own role as a “community organizer” before a similar group of academics, eliciting the same approval from her colleagues.

Yet, such feverish self-congratulation is typically reserved for political rallies, and these professors surrender their scholarly credentials by acknowledging their work as belligerent peddlers of influence for the Islamist faction. Any semblance of neutrality on behalf of Sonn or Erakat is discarded when they ecstatically concede their own bias as zealously involved activists. Furthermore, their capacity for fair, impartial and even competent scholarship is called into question when a ubiquitously defined terrorist group like Hamas is described as a forum for social activism.

Western professors teach contradictory ideas like “moral relativism” and “transversal grief” that claim the deaths of terrorists and infants are equally detestable

The vilification of white men is just about the only certainty which these activist-professors are willing to endorse. All other ideas are morally discursive, and there are no absolutes in this world. Butler and her accomplices are too unassertive to say whether or not the deaths of 130 innocent Parisians at the hands of ISIS sympathizers in 2015 is any more heartbreaking than the slaying of some 111 Hezbollah terrorists by Israel the week before. Butler calls such cowardice “transversal grief,” defending the idea that all killing is equally outrageous despite circumstances.

Professor Erekat is equally confused concerning ideas of justice and is unable to recognize moral variation. She once notoriously tweeted of the Israeli Defense Forces that “an active combat soldier, even if not in the field, can be killed.” Professors like Butler and Erakat fail to distinguish between a faction which implements the strictest measures within its military forces to avoid unnecessary casualties, and a faction which intentionally targets innocent civilians to maximize an enemy’s terror and produce a political response.

Reluctant to see the world in terms of good and evil, Butler also insists that a uniformed soldier conducting war under the stipulations of the Geneva Convention is no less reprehensible than a terrorist hiding amongst the populace and targeting unarmed bystanders. This cultural relativity and the refusal to define anything is notably absent, though, in any discussion occurring in classrooms about the evil American-Israeli axis aligned against the humble, good-natured minorities of the world. In only this instance a strict binary exists: the greedy, duplicitous Jew juxtaposed with the victimized, well-intentioned Arab Palestinian.

An Non-scholarly Debate

A documentary detailing the experiences of ex-Muslims and their criticism of Islam was broadcast at a Portland State University, but not before the program was branded as “Atheist Islamophobia” by anonymous students and event fliers were torn down across campus.

In the aftermath of the documentary viewing, former and practicing Muslims entered into a rare discussion on the topics presented by the film. Among the talks was an exegetical debate about the punishment for apostasy in Islam. Despite universal concurrence from all four Sunni and all four Shiite schools of jurisprudence, direct citations from the Quran and sponsorship from leading Islamic religious leaders, many students refused to acknowledge that the punishment for apostasy among Muslims is death.

To be certain, there are many aspects of Islamic jurisprudence that are at odds with Western modes of appropriate moral conduct. Rather than discuss these for the benefit of Islamic civilization, though, academia would prefer to offer counterfactual theological presentations of the Quran and Islamic traditions. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill attempted to do just this by assigning an overly sympathetic, whitewashed analysis of Islam through the book Approaching the Quran: The Early Revelations, by Michael A. Sells. By mandating a text exclusively covering the first 35 suras of the Quran, which are recognized as the more peaceful, pastoral passages of the Quran, students are furnished with a reading of the Quran that contradicts its deeper meaning and compels the reader to draw antithetical conclusions about Islam as a whole.

Only later, in the period covering Mohammed’s exodus to the city of Medina, does the Quran become violently unrestrained. For instance, it was during this period of the Medina years that Mohammed became a brigand, raiding Meccan caravans and enslaving some of his former Jewish allies. The prophet of Islam’s genocidal fervor was manifested by the beheading massacre of over 800 men and boys from the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza in response to direct orders from Mohammed. The women of this tribe likely desired a similar fate as their husbands, brothers, and fathers; they were subsequently pressed into sexual slavery. Mohammed proclaimed that this act was the will of Allah.

There is even evidence in the Quran that Mohammed personally involved himself in the physical massacre of the Qurayza. Verse 33:26 speaks directly to Mohammed regarding his Jewish victims: “…some you slew, some you took captive.” Unfortunately for students of the UNC course exclusively studying the earliest Quranic revelations, this mass extermination would appear comically uncharacteristic of their perception of a Christ-like Mohammed.

In an open letter to Sells challenging his claim that Islam is a religion of peace, former Muslim Ali Sina asked why only the earliest passages of the Quran are used by Sells to illustrate his contentions. Sina correctly points out that the Quran becomes increasingly militant in later chapters covering the period where Mohammed took up arms against his Jewish and pagan enemies and the Islamic conquests are explored.

Even more relevant to any discussion of Islam and peace is the doctrine of abrogation. Sina could have been speaking to many academics when he demanded that Sell acknowledge the doctrine of abrogation and its impact on Islamic jurisprudence. Sina writes, “I am sure a person of your caliber is familiar with this Islamic science and knows perfectly that the later revelations annulled the early revelations. This is known to all the Muslim scholars as well as to the terrorists who put those teachings into practice. They know perfectly which part of the Quran overrides which part. The Meccan part however, although mostly abrogated is often used by Islamic apologists to softsell their harsh religion and fool the gullible westerner by showing them the nice part of the Quran that is already abrogated.”

The American Family Association Center for Law and Policy, on behalf of taxpayers and dissenting students, sued the university in an attempt to change the assigned reading to a text free from political bias, and congressional lawmakers followed suit by terminating funding for the UNC course. Ultimately, the court dismissed the case.

Other recurring fallacies exist and are taught like doctrine in university classrooms. Many professors have desperately grasped onto a 2015 New America Foundation study that states that more Americans are killed by right-wing white supremacists than Islamic terrorism. Besides being factually inaccurate by failing to cite at least six obvious instances of Islamic terrorism, the study fails to include the single deadliest day for U.S. civilians: 9/11. So if one starts counting bodies on September 12th, 2001, fails to mention six attacks by Muslims committed in the name of Islam, and also completely fails to count attacks on Americans living abroad or on U.S. military personnel, one may conclude that white bigotry is more dangerous than militant Islam. The New America Foundation study was also conducted before 2015, and the last two years have seen a sharp increase in domestic Islamic terrorism.

This type of politically charged “study” is characteristic of the quality of research conducted by today’s academic elite. Misinformation is used to focus the discourse towards identity politics while ignoring a wealth of conflicting data.

The Islamophobia Lobby, as groups like CAIR and their allies in academia should be known, seeks to stifle any scrutiny of Islamic extremism and jihad, especially in the aftermath of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims, thereby reversing public outrage and redirecting animus towards the victims of successive national tragedies.

An extraordinary amount of scholarship is devoted towards Islamophobia. The trending fashion of Islamophobia as a subject of scholarly preoccupation is evidenced by the reactionary impulses of collegiate faculty and administrators in the days following the unforeseen election of Trump. One display of collectivized activism among academics included the participation of professors from 25 otherwise prestigious universities around America voicing their dissent for the results of the 2016 election. On January 18 of that year, instructors participating in the show of opposition utilized class time to educate their students concerning the “institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.”

Other university faculty around the nation responded on their own to local reports of hate crimes against their Muslim student bodies. President Michael Drake of The Ohio State University, in solidarity with other prominent faculty, drafted an open letter condemning perceived instances of hatred for Muslims in the aftermath of the Trump election. In doing so, Drake and his staff may have inadvertently contributed to the radicalization of OSU student and Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan. Days before faculty drafted the open letter, Artan voiced paranoid concerns quoted by the student newspaper that his religious identity inspired hatred from other students, citing the lack of available prayer space as evidence of a non-inclusive campus. Certainly, then, confirmation from educated professionals regarding the anti-Muslim atmosphere at Ohio State could have instigated the eventual assault perpetrated by Artan when he stabbed nine of his fellow classmates after running into a crowd with his vehicle.

Despite the enormous sum of political and intellectual energy aimed at examining hatred towards Muslims, there is simply no demonstrably substantive evidence to suggest that Muslims are the frequent victims of hate crimes perpetrated by Americans. Notably, the source most frequently cited by academics and Islamists as the definitive subject matter experts regarding the documentation of accumulated hate crimes and identification of hate groups has been widely discredited. A 2014 study led by Professor George Yancey of the University of North Texas, “Watching the Watchers: The Neglect of Academic Analysis of Progressive Groups,” found that the Southern Poverty Law Center lacked an objective criteria for concluding which organizations should be labelled as hate groups. A cursory examination of SPLC’s “Hate Watch” list includes the Center for Security Policy, a think tank composed of deeply respected defense and intelligence agents committed to national defense. Other horrific conservative monsters deserving of SPLC’s wrathful auditing have included Dr. Ben Carson, one-time presidential candidate and Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, critics of the controversial program known as Common Core, and the Family Research Council. In fact, the SPLC’s “Hate Map” was instrumental in assisting crazed Leftist extremist Floyd Lee Corkins in locating the FRC, where he injured one Christian bystander before being subdued.

Still, many professors continue to reference SPLC in order to reinforce the Islamophobia Lobby’s claims that Muslims are the victims of a non-inclusive society. Fewer than 30 days from Election Day, the SPLC was reporting more than 701 hate crimes, prompting hysterical media accounts that failed to consider the validity of their sources. Indeed, these “attacks,” as many media and political commentators called them, were nothing more than uncorroborated verbal insults.

WND journalist Leo Hohmann is correct when he states that these slurs, “while mean and nasty, don’t appear to pass the smell test required of a crime.” Yet academics, who are expected to subject their sources to rigorous scrutiny in their search for the Truth, gloss over this and many other facts in pursuit of a political end. It is, in fact, impossible to assess the authenticity of hate crime reporting. This is especially true given the multitudes of allegations of Islamophobia that are later proven to be exaggerated, invented, or even committed by Muslims themselves. The frequency of these alarming deceptions is such that it would be cumbersome to include them here, though The Geller Report authoritatively tracks and reports these instances on a nearly weekly basis.

Even reports of hate crimes by the FBI are difficult to seriously consider from an academic standpoint given the disparate standards applied to defining these offenses. The only variable in the FBI’s assessment of hate crime’s, it seems, is the identity of the victim. Law enforcement are often reluctant to report obvious cases of violent, racially motivated attacks against white victims, while routinely reporting and prosecuting the most adolescent instances of verbal insults levied against minority victims.

Given the preposterous nature of these claims, it should be inconceivable that any scholarly professional should undertake to support the claims of the SPLC and the Islamophobia Lobby. Finding themselves philosophically cornered by the vulnerabilities of their subjective assumptions, liberal academia chooses instead to retreat from the intellectual battlefield, licking their wounds from their “safe spaces” and “sanctuary cities” before returning to the front once more with fresh supplies of partisan nonsense.

It is of no surprise, then, that instructors like Brown University’s intersectionalist professor Nancy Khalek should prefer to engage in discourse rather than debate. While she admits that the former is more constructive, it is also conceivable that the art of debate is lost on contemporary academics.

Islamists recently dominated the elections in Egypt following the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood government was quickly replaced, though, after demonstrating a propensity for violent oppression (among other reasons)

Non-scholarly, fictionalized attempts by academia are used to obscure the ideological composition of mainstream Islam, as well. Many academic apologists proudly cite a 2008 Gallup Poll that determined that a mere seven percent of Muslims believe that the attacks on September 11th, 2001 were “completely justified.” This small minority, however, constitutes 91 million Muslims endorsing the purposeful slaying of thousands of innocent noncombatants. A terrifying total of 36 percent of Muslims globally believe that the same assault on America was at least partially justified. Incredulously, leading Middle East scholars insist that these numbers illustrate the robustness of the moderate Muslim community. Esposito and his colleague, Dalia Mogahed, carefully used the results of the Gallup poll to produce a report which attempts to minimize at all costs the apparent size of Islam’s extremist population.

However, in a follow-up interview conducted post-publication of the Esposito and Mogahed report, the latter scholar admits that imprecise, groundless conclusions were drawn from unsound measurements to loosely determine that only seven percent of the world’s Muslims are extremist. Notably, the actual Gallup Poll questions and procedures were absent from the report, and Mogahed admits that the answers given by respondents should have resulted in a sum of extremists closer to 14 percent. One could also make the perfectly legitimate argument that a respondent who believes the 9/11 attacks were even “somewhat justified” could be labeled extremist, in which case there are 432 million radical Islamists in the world (estimates far exceeding those from influential anti-Islamists like Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller).

A War of Ideas

Another popular thesis among academia insists that many Muslims define the conflict with the West in extremes in response to the Western propensity for the same. For example, Muslims believe that Westerners wish to dismantle Islam and replace it with an immoral, materialistic value system, while Westerners imagine that Muslims wish to install Sharia Islam around the world. Indeed, both sides do appear to qualify the conflict in these cataclysmic terms, but academics insist upon the former while minimizing the latter.

University professors, with their reliance on a couple of decades of imperialism to describe the present state of the Middle East and North Africa, truly believe that America and her allies would replace the humble, agrarian values of Islam with–well, McDonald’s.

The conflicting means by which academia might explain world events is best elucidated in the classic article by Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld.” With great foresight, Barber argued in 1992 that geopolitics could be explained by either the forces of globalism or the forces of tribalism. Globalism, or McWorld, was ignoring or replacing national boundaries with market imperatives, resource management, information technologies, and ecological mandates. Certainly, these are the greatest threats to humankind, according to academics and socialists. Here again, Islamists and collegiate scholars share an ideological overlap, as many Islamic fundamentalists believe that the West wishes to impose their capitalist imperatives upon the Muslim world, replacing tradition with materialism.

However true it may be that multinational corporations are more powerful than ever, it is not globalism but factionalism, or Barber’s “jihad” that truly produces the friction leading to conflict in the modern world, and the reluctance of academia to accept this establishes the framework for an Islamic-academic axis.

When Barber authored his seminal work he found that, “There were more than thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, racial, tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. Some new world order!” This is the jihad to which Barber refers, and while he does not mean to classify the term as purely Islamic, surely Islamic jihad is included within it. Yet academia and Islamic apologists in the face of enormous data prefer to ignore the real sources of violent contention within the modern world, seeking instead to sound the alarm in response to a threat that will never surface. Since 1992, conflicts continue to be instigated by factional tendencies rather than the forces of globalism, from sectarian divide in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, to ethnic strife in Sudan, Somalia, South Kyrgyzstan, Balochistan, the Niger Delta and the Ivory Coat among many, many other conflicts of this type. The facts are truly representative of a world constantly beset by factional division, and not by the forces of globalism. In many ways, this is affirming for the extreme Western narrative that jihadists threaten world peace, while invalidating the narrative that consumerism and corporate interests are a threat to international stability–let alone Islam.

Map showing conflicts around the world and their intensity. Nearly all contemporary wars are fought over factional differences

The West could never replace or otherwise abolish Islam. The proof is in the power of the Islamophobia lobby in America and Europe. Conversely, it is not outside the realm of possibility to perceive that Islamists would wish to install Sharia law across the world. A super-majority of Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia want to see Sharia law established in their countries, according a Pew Research Study. The study also found that, “Nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) and most in Iraq (91%) and Pakistan (84%) support Sharia law as a replacement for any secular considerations.”

There is no clearer example of Islamist designs upon the world than evidence discovered over a decade ago which explicitly communicates the goals of an Islamist group operating in America. A Muslim Brotherhood in America document, dated from 1991 but seized in 2004, describes the blanket goals of a number of Muslim organizations operating overtly in the U.S. as a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” Part of this grand strategy includes infiltrating political and academic institutions and gradually pursuing policies and indoctrinating the public with the desired end state of normalizing Islamist thought. Today, with the help of academia and the curriculum they espouse, these groups are closer than ever to their goal.

In a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future. But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.”

Therefore, it appears that one of the two narratives that perceives the Western-Islamic conflict in terms of absolutes, or that Muslims wish to enforce their religion upon the world, has some factual basis. Meanwhile, the idea that Westerners would forcibly eradicate Islam is demonstrably false.

Unfortunately, the end-state of this politically-charged social agenda engineered by Leftist academics is a student body primed for radicalization.

]]>A recent episode of the hit ABC sitcom Black-ish has been celebrated for evoking rivulets of tears among fans of the show for its thought-provoking commentary on the U.S. presidential election. Words like “powerful” and “historic” have been conjured up by some viewers to describe the episode, called “Lemons,” while others were rendered speechless by the performance of the show’s star Dre Johnson, played by the talented Anthony Anderson. Millions of fans across America of all colors and creeds sat captivated in their living rooms as Johnson recited an emotionally stirring speech that addressed the election of Donald Trump and was punctuated by images of slavery and civil rights oppression.

Yet, Anderson’s performance was just that: an act, strong on emotion and totally lacking in factual substance. Just the type of Hollywood performance that enthralls and motivates the democratic base, with the precise composition of fireworks, star power, and production wizardry to send viewers back in a liberal time machine and convince passengers that they are living in the 1800s Jim Crow South.

In other words, the Johnson’s are conflicted over exchanging their inherent black coolness for butt-clenching white awkwardness.

Such Caucasian social incompetence is on full display when a bespectacled, cardigan-sporting co-worker with a boyishly nerdy comb-over sets up the Johnson monologue by asking him, “Why do you not care about what’s happening to our country?” He is woefully unprepared for the Obama-esque lecture which is to follow.

Johnson theatrically responds with his keynote address on social justice as moody, grieving singing is heard and still images flash across the screen depicting the (50-60 year old) civil rights movement:

“What did you say to me? You don’t think I care about this country? I love this country even though at times it doesn’t love me back. For my whole life– my parents, my grandparents, me, most black people–this system has never worked for us. But we still play ball. Tried to do our best to live by the rules even though we knew they would never work out in our favor. Had to live in neighborhoods that you wouldn’t drive through. Send our kids to schools with books so beat up that you couldn’t read them, work jobs that you wouldn’t even consider in your nightmares. Black people wake up everyday believing that our lives are gonna change even though everything around us says it’s not.”

“Truth be told, you ask most black people and they tell you no matter who won this election they didn’t expect the hood to get better. But they still voted, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“You think I’m not sad that Hillary didn’t win? That I’m not terrified about what Trump’s about to do? I’m used to things not going my way. I’m sorry that you’re not and it’s blowing your mind, so excuse me if I get a little offended because I didn’t see all of this outrage when everything was happening to all of my people since we were stuffed on boats in chains. I love this country as much–if not more–than you.”

Johnson executes a de facto microphone drop as he gets up from the table from which he was seated and leaves his colleagues in stunned shame. A slow clap seems appropriate here…

If the gushing, fawning fans prostrating themselves on Twitter and Facebook are any indication, the multi-layered hypocrisy of Anderson’s performance is lost on the masses.

Both Anderson and the character he portrays are anything but downtrodden. The prevailing theme of the show is that black Americans are unprepared to deal with their equality. ABC describes their Golden Globe winning show:

“Andre ‘Dre’ Johnson (Anthony Anderson) has a great job, a beautiful wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), four kids and a colonial home in the ‘burbs. But has success brought too much assimilation for this black family? With a little help from his dad (Laurence Fishburne), Dre sets out to establish a sense of cultural identity for his family that honors their past while embracing the future.”

So what exactly did Johnson mean when he said, “For my whole life…this system has never worked for us?” Surely the system is operating with maximum impartiality and fairness if Johnson’s greatest concern is avoiding becoming too white. “Too much assimilation” is an insulting way of criticizing dull and flavorless white American culture.

Perhaps this is why Trump took exception to the hit television program long before the airing of this episode. As far back as 2014, the future president objected to Black-ish for the racist undertones inherent to a show that looks so derisively at white people.

How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled "Blackish"? Can you imagine the furor of a show, "Whiteish"! Racism at highest level?

Both Dre Johnson and the man who plays him are, relatively speaking, privileged elitists. The character portrayed by Anderson is a successful advertising executive whose peers and superiors at work are often afraid to press him on certain issues for fear of being racially insensitive. Anderson himself is a career actor, unfamiliar with rejection since he began training as a comedic performer in high school and college, landing successive roles on television and the big screen with very few periods of unemployment.

Likewise, Johnson’s wife Rainbow (the name checks out, she is of mixed racial heritage), is a medical doctor and mother of four. Of course, she identifies as a black woman and is upset when her eldest son brings home a white girlfriend Incidentally, Dre Johnson is overjoyed that his wife feels this way because, as he puts it, they can both “distrust white people together.” He even jokingly remarks that their mutual disdain for white people could save their marriage, using humor that is typical of the show.

A recurring theme on Black-ish has Johnson antagonizing the multi-ethnic Rainbow for not being black enough. Lola Bakare of the Daily Dot finds this, and many of the show’s other themes, extremely off-putting.

“For every person of color who has ever been accused of ‘talking white’ or ‘not being black enough,’ this notion is utterly cringe-worthy,” she says.

The Johnson’s fear of assimilation is, ironically, the source of many black American’s present struggles. The rap culture that glorifies the pursuit of multiple sexual partners and results in too many single black mothers is a far greater threat to black prosperity than any systemic obstacles to success. The celebration of gangsterism and the objectification of women, two prevalent themes of urban rap culture, must be exchanged for assimilated values in order for some black American segments of society to emerge from the depths of poverty, crime and despair. Of course, this does not require black people to adopt a purely white way of living, as Johnson seems to perpetually fear; the multitudes of positive traits unique to black culture need only be emphasized and adapted to modern circumstances.

Instead, television shows like Black-ish succeed only in perpetuating the self-destructive aspects of black American culture. After some pensive reflection on what the election means for America, Johnson remarks, “I’ve been lucky enough to raise four beautiful children in a world that showed them Jay Z and Beyoncé as king and queen, a black family in the White House, and a woman run and almost win the presidency of the United States.” While the obsession with identity from the Left is worthy of condemnation, the true fault in Johnson’s conclusion is that he finds himself lucky that Jay Z and Beyoncé, two pop culture icons, have been coronated by the White House and serve as role models to black children.

Jay Z and Beyoncé are close Obama supporters, present at numerous fundraising events and practically fixtures on the campaign trail. Obama has consistently remarked about his personal closeness to the rapper, inviting him to private, invitation-only parties at the White House, and allowing daughters Sasha and Malia to attend his profanity-laden concerts.

For the writers of Black-ish to celebrate the social standing of the pop star duo and their familiarity with the Obama family is a sad commentary on American values. To make a role model of Jay Z is to disregard his troubled past as a crack dealer and self-professed street hustler. The millionaire rap mogul also shot his brother and stabbed a record producer in 1999.

If Anderson wishes to see conditions in “the hood” improved, a prudent place to start would be with denouncing artists like Jay Z who use the word “bitch” in over 50 percent of his songs. Perhaps Anderson and other black leaders should reevaluate the value system of a culture that venerates the denigration of women. The popularization of such disrespect results in 72 percent of black children living in single parent homes against a 25 percent national average.

Black-ish is undeserving of the gushing praise that media outlets like CNN, the Washington Post and Vox are excreting. Just because “there’s no Clinton cheerleading,” as Vox writer Alex Abad-Santos claims, does not mean that the episode should be applauded for taking a look at the election from all vantage points. Johnson’s colleague Lucy (Catherine Reitman) is immediately shouted down and condemned for admitting that she voted for Trump, and other characters in Johnson’s life are a picture of sadness and depression even two months after the election. Meanwhile, nameless white men are seen high-fiving in the corridors of Johnson’s workplace or mercilessly harassing minority workers, exalting in their Great White victory. It is a surreal image and a distorted view of post-election America that will likely become more fantastic as the Trump presidency progresses.

If there are competing narratives on the election offered by Black-ish, as so many in the media and Twitter inexplicably contend, they certainly are not about partisanship. The supposedly groundbreaking tolerance exhibited by the show is concerning just how racist America really is, or just how much to care about the election or fear a Trump presidency. These are all variations, though, of a decidedly intolerant, liberal disposition with little room for any real alternative political voices.

Remarking on the diverse variety of political opinions that the Left is claiming the episode portrayed, Anderson says, “It captured not only the voice of Andre, but also the voice of concerned Americans, and the voice of those who are also pro-Trump. This isn’t an anti-Trump script at all. It’s just a script about our reality in terms of what this election meant to us and what it means moving forward for the next four years.”

Surely, those who are pro-Trump would dispute Anderson’s claim that their views were represented by the episode.

When Lucy, who reluctantly admits to voting for Trump, defends herself against her coworker’s implications of racism, she makes the mistake of claiming to have black friends.

Citing one’s black friends as evidence of tolerance, according to social justice advocates, is a social faux pas and is itself and indication of bigotry. Perhaps this is the pro-Trump voice to which Anderson refers? A foolishly misguided voice that is ignorant of its own innate racism, apparently. Black-ish has no space for a character actually committed to conservative principles, however, and Lucy admits that she voted for Obama in the last two elections, and only reluctantly selected Trump out of a distaste for Hillary Clinton and her failure to offer any new ideas.

Hailed for bravely displaying a diverse set of political expressions, in the end Black-ish really only succeeds in accommodating the spectrum of Leftist voices. From Rainbow Johnson on the far Left, who grieves the loss of Clinton like the death of a child, to Lucy the turncoat democrat, who grudgingly accepts Trump despite her numerous black friends, the story told is a decidedly liberal one.

When Johnson reflects on the way forward after over 50 million Americans voted for Trump, he offers this: “I don’t think that all, half, or even most of them are nuts.”

Unfortunately, this episode, and just about every other Black-ish episode ever aired, spent the last twenty minutes contradicting Johnson’s claim and characterizing the other side as anything but sane.

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/blackish/feed/1http://crusadeoftruth.com/blackish/The Truth about academic jihad: the professoratehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/nN5w0yBbsrg/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/truth-academic-jihad-professorate/#commentsWed, 04 Jan 2017 23:28:24 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=329This is the first of three installments in a special report from Crusade of Truth exploring the alliance between Islam

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This is the first of three installments in a special report from Crusade of Truth exploring the alliance between Islam and Western academia. First, the professors that make up the fundamental substratum of academia are explored, revealing a community of fringe radicals who embrace a socialist anti-Americanism that is strangely harmonious with militant Islam. Part two of this report will cover the stunted curriculum taught in universities which overstates the effects of colonialism while minimizing the violent expansionism inherent to Islam. The final chapter of this series will explore the results of this system of putting radical Leftists in charge of teaching an anti-Western, socialist syllabus on the student body, in many case transforming pre-radicalized pupils into prosecutors of terror.

In sanctums for radical Islam like those found in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, religious schools called “madrassas” teach a violent curriculum that pits Islam against the West. This is the epicenter of hard core, fundamentalist Islam, where the ideological core of groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are formed.

At a very young age, young Muslims boys receiving tuition at a madrassa will learn that America is an empire of evil, and only jihadist warfare can bring the West to its knees. In some locations, emaciated boys seated in threadbare classrooms are made to memorize passages from the Quran in a language they do not even understand. These impressionable boys depend upon strict spiritual counselors to provide hysterically turbulent translations from the only text book they will ever know. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission Report found that these schools, numbering in the tens of thousands, “have been used as incubators for violent extremism.”

This study of hatred is expounded and explored in Islamic madrassas throughout the world, nurtured by a paranoid suspicion that the West wishes to replace religious tradition with a system of capitalist exploitation and saturnalian depravity.

However, this very same narrative is expressed in arenas uncomfortably familiar to many Americans. Throughout the corridors of Western academic institutions, a similar syllabus is taught. From elitist Ivy League schools to online community colleges, formative minds are learning that America is the Great Oppressor, extracting resources solely for material gain from obliging, harmless shepherds and peace-loving farmers from North Africa to Southeast Asia. It is a message not altogether dissimilar from the one taught in the most extremist Islamic madrassa.

Just as the Middle Eastern madrassa is used to arouse a violent disregard for non-Muslim lives, American and European universities espouse the same repugnant principles by identifying the West as the perpetual Muslim tormentor, obsessed with subjugating people, raping them of their culture and robbing them of their dignity.

There are numerous reasons why the liberal academic establishment pursues this fiction. It complies with the socialist agenda, simultaneously fitting with and replacing class warfare as the crisis requiring an immediate remedial response via the redistribution of wealth. Furthermore, to expose neocolonialism as a Western evil exacted upon the disadvantaged is to embrace isolationism and the subsequent crippling of the American military establishment–persistent goals of the Left.

Finally, this insistence upon the colonial narrative fits neatly within the purview of identity politics and coincides with the victimization campaigns that liberals are wont to subscribe. These deceitful practices feature prominently among contemporary Muslim apologists, including much of the mainstream media, academia, and Muslim rights groups, and accusations of “Islamophobia” are pronounced with dramatic frequency on many college campuses.

However, this twisted curriculum could not be hawked and dictated without an appropriate preacher. No ordinary Westerner could be so self-effacing and hateful as to sponsor the revisionist narrative taught by modern collegiate professors.

The Professorate

The ranks of higher education are teeming with an overabundance of political radicals. These are the intelligentsia, the social elite, so consumed by the singular issue to which they have devoted their entire lives in the pursuit of a doctoral degree that they fail to see the prudence of a common, public good. They will see their program of study elevated at any cost, and often at the expense of commerce or universal progress..

At best, these professors are cultural Marxists, seeking an artificially invested diversity that is simply ignorant of reality and promises to leave students woefully unprepared for the workplace. At worst, America’s youth are being influenced to form ideologies that are sympathetic to militant Islam. Understanding the backgrounds and belief systems that inform the thinking of Western professors explains why students are being exposed to an unyielding, extremist philosophy in the classroom.

The most predictably dangerous of these faculty, at least when considering the young and impressionable mind, is the professor or Middle Eastern studies. In some cases, it may be difficult to distinguish the words of a firebrand Imam from a college professor of this background.

John Esposito’s literature on the subject of Islam is included in the syllabi of many courses within the department of Middle Eastern studies. As a Georgetown University professor of religion and international affairs, specializing in Islamic studies, as well as being the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Esposito is representative of mainstream scholarly discourse on the subject of Islam. Having written over 30 books on the subject, his reputation is appreciated to the extent that the FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security have all consulted with him as an expert.

Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University

However, an Investigative Project on Terrorism report illustrates the dangerously questionable nature of Esposito’s relationship with the supporters and financiers of international terrorism. The report’s conclusions are damning: “Esposito’s academic standing provides him an opportunity to defend radical Islam and promote its ideology – including defending terrorist organizations and those who support them, advocating for Islamist regimes, praising radical Islamists and their apologists, and downplaying the threat of Islamist violence and involvement with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the U.S.”

Esposito is engaged in an ideological partnership with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a front group for Muslim rights that is tied to international terrorism via their support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. His loyalty to the group is such that Esposito has participated in numerous fundraisers on CAIR’s behalf, as well as serving as a defense expert in the case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development that sought to prosecute CAIR and other militant Islamists.

Esposito perpetually defends Hamas and Hezbollah as legitimate political forces, despite the international consensus that identifies them as terrorist organizations, human rights offenders, and aggressors in the conflict with Israel.

The professor of Middle Eastern studies calls his “very close friend” Sami Al-Arian “an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice.” This statement came after Al-Arian was convicted of providing material goods and support to the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2006.

Esposito is a lecturer whose books and opinions will inform the policies of the world’s next generation of leaders regarding the Middle East, a region that promises to see an escalation of violence in the coming decades.

At some undefined stage, American universities began associating the radical with the revolutionary, or the criminal with the contemplative. The felonious were offered faculty positions, so long as their crimes were committed for a righteous liberal cause. Conservative principles do not thrive in such an environment and, indeed, the state, corporate interests and society at large are condemned by instructors from these types of backgrounds.

Yet, these are not simply rebels with a cause. Department heads are actively seeking out and recruiting what can only be described as left-wing terrorists and thugs.

In 1981, as a member of an anti-imperialist, leftist group called Weather Underground, Kathy Boudin participated in the Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York that left three people dead. After pleading guilty to second degree murder, Boudin received 20 years to life and was released in 2003. In 2008, she received a competitive teaching position from an Ivy League institution.

Brinks truck similar to the type used in the 1981 Weather Underground heist

Bill Ayers, Howard Machtinger and Bernadine Dohrne were also involved in bombing plots as members of Weather Underground in the 1960s and 1970s, including planned and actual attacks against military and police targets. This, of course, qualified them for faculty positions at major American universities, such as Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, respectively.

After receiving a pardon from President Bill Clinton for her involvement in the Brinks robbery and a later arrest for the possession of over 700 pounds of explosives and illegal weapons, Susan Rosenberg quickly found a teaching position at John Jay College.

The list of Leftist radicals lecturing America’s youth from the halls of learning includes more than a few members of Weather Underground, unfortunately. Former senior Black Panther member Erica Huggins went to trial for torturing and later ordering the execution of a suspected police informant within her organization. Warren Kimbro ultimately pulled the trigger that killed their helpless victim. Naturally, both Huggins and Kimbro received coveted teaching and administrative positions at prominent universities.

These Leftist terrorists–for lack of a better description–are welcomed in scholarly circles for more than their insurrectionary complexion; it is undoubtedly the combination of fanaticism and collectivism with a sprinkle of victimhood politics that permit this radical-academic alliance.

Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix explains the attraction of young voters with a fossilized Marxist like Sanders. “They’re taught the rich have an obligation to support the poor. They’re taught to embrace class warfare. They’re taught corporations are evil. They’re taught life’s unfair, and there’s no hope for them to succeed except through government handouts.”

Academia’s insistence on a socialist curriculum is insufficient on its own to explain how radical Islam is able to prosper in a university setting. Assuredly, an understanding of the structural attributes which define both socialism and Islam works to illuminate their compatibility.

In many ways, Islam–like socialism–is about control. It is a patriarchal system that seeks to enforce the most mundane controls upon its adherents. From the most obscene gender inequality on Earth designed to subjugate women as second-class citizens, to establishing the very way that Muslims should complete a bowel movement, strict, unyielding dominion over the faithful is a requisite function of Islam.

A report from Oxford Islamic Studies describes the crossroads between the spiritual and the secular, or socialism and Islam:

“Reformists saw Islamic socialism as a cure for colonial control, economic backwardness, human exploitation, and moral bankruptcy. Spiritual and economic improvement were not possible until the lives of people could be improved and the decent treatment and justice stipulated by the Quran could be provided to them.”

These essential equivalences allow most of academia to accommodate Islam, an ally in the perpetual conflict with the forces of capitalism and ideological inclusiveness. This accommodation extends to radical Islamists and jihadists, whom also have a place in the faculty lounges of college campuses.

Jesse Curtis Morton, aka Younus Abdullah Muhammad, is perhaps the most fitting representative of academia’s affair with militant Islam. In a PBS “Newshour” report meant to explain (and forgive) Morton’s evolution from radical Islamist to FBI informant, the argument that universities are contributing to the radicalization of politically sensitive Muslim students is inadvertently made.

Jesse Curtis Morton

Morton admits, “I identified with the sort of anti-imperialist message that was being promoted by Al Qaeda.” The same anti-imperialist message being trafficked at university settings with troubling frequency.

It is no surprise, then, that rather than suppress his extremist and violent worldview, Morton’s time in an American institution of learning served to exacerbate his already volatile nature. In an interview with Morton, Hari Sreenivasan deduced that “the Ivy League education did nothing to moderate Morton’s world view. In 2007, he and a few other radicals started the Revolution Muslim Web site [sic].”

After Morton was arrested in Morocco, where he was teaching English, and extradited to the U.S. for communicating threats online, it was a fellow academic that ultimately bailed him out. Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, intervened on Morton’s behalf to have his sentence reduced in exchange for cooperation in prosecuting other potential terrorists that visited Morton’s website.

Morton is now employed by George Washington University.

In socialist Canada, six young Muslims were allegedly radicalized by a single Islamist-professor who rented space from local universities to teach his brutal brand of Islam. The group, including four men and two women, left Canada and entered Syria via Turkey to fight for the Islamic State. Adil Charkaoui insists that he simply taught a course in basic Arabic and religious studies.

However, Newsweek reported that, “Canada had tried to deport Charkaoui, an outspoken Moroccan-born advocate against Islamophobia, arresting him in 2003 and keeping him imprisoned or under surveillance for six years under a security certificate, based on classified information from Canada’s spy agency.” They failed to pursue allegations that Charkaoui trained at an Al-Qaeda camp in order to protect human intelligence sources.

Al Qaeda training manual, or university textbook?

Understanding the relationship between radical Islam and academia permits a commensurate understanding of the hateful post-election rhetoric coming from Islamist professors. Their inability to accept any competing narrative is responsible for the unapologetic vehemence which flavors their words.

Indeed, hatred for the president-elect has entered into mainstream pedagogy for American professors. A profession once extolled for its objective rationality has resorted to name-calling and rabble-rousing in attempts to agitate their student bodies.

Writing for the Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum dedicated to improving Middle Eastern studies within U.S. academic circles, Middle East analysts Cinnamon Stillwell and Michael Lumish record a revealing compilation of statements from prominent professors in the aftermath of Trump’s unexpected election victory in an article titled “Trump terror within Middle East studies.”

Stillwell and Lumish demonstrate the scandalous partisanship present at institutions once prized for their pursuit of scholastic excellence. Identity politics were certainly at play when Director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center Omid Safi blames white evangelical Christians for electing Trump. “When you had to choose between your white privilege and your Jesus, how did you live with yourself putting Jesus on the bottom?”

Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, offers an equally embryonic analysis: “Trump’s victory will stand as America’s Brexit moment where Islamophobia, anti-immigrant discourses, economic dislocation, and nativist sentiments got masterfully mobilized to win an election.”

Hamid Dabashi, Iranian studies professor at Columbia University, had no shortage of uncomplimentary names for those that voted for Trump. He attributes the Trump victory to “racist, misogynist, ignorant, paranoid, xenophobic, white supremacist America,” before proceeding to call these same Americans “an angry mob of white supremacist zombies shielding its wild fantasies behind democratic politics.”

As indicated by Stillwell and Lumish, University of Denver Center for Middle East Studies director Nader Hashemi believes that ISIS is “celebrating” the Trump victory because the president-elect is “so radical and so extreme.” Hashemi must be unaware that Trump’s popularity is very high among Iraqis precisely because of his tough stance against international terrorism.

Rhodes College Islamic studies professor Yasir Qadhi is convinced that people voted for Trump because of his “melanin content.” He conjures up a favorite image among Muslim rights activists when he says he fears “for the safety of my wife in a hijab, of my children in the streets, of minorities everywhere struggling to understand what happened.”

Reza Aslan, University of California, Riverside professor of creative writing and liberal media darling agrees that the republican victory hurts America’s children. “Someone please tell me how I tell my kids that the president whose picture will soon be on their classroom wall hates them, wants them gone.”

This impetuous stampede of overstated anti-Trump resentment from academia has been relentless since before November 8th, 2016. However, Stillwell and Lumish are right to suggest that such vehemence “exemplified the elite attitudes that doubtless drove many voters to support Trump.”

Consequently, the motive behind this disinformation campaign is as clear as it is futile: to discredit Trump by assigning artificial causes to his victory. Besides pointing to the Russian hacking scandal and a rash of fake or misleading news reports, the Left argues that Trump won because he inspired some dormant but powerful white supremacist demographic to take to the polls in response to his hateful rhetoric. In other words, only bigotry and ignorance could be responsible for a Trump victory.

Trump’s repeated calls for increased scrutiny of immigrants arriving from war-torn countries that lack the infrastructure to properly identify potential radicals that come from Islamist circles had somehow been identified as misogynistic and xenophobic by these professors. Long before and after Election Day, Trump and his most trusted staffers have reinforced this policy in response to a hostile, headline-seeking media’s attempts to instigate the republican candidate into saying something disparaging of Muslims. Although this effort was unsuccessful, and Trump was clear and consistent regarding his vetting policy, liberal academia chose to ignore reality and insist that Trump was demanding a “Muslim ban.”

Donald Trump’s calls for extreme vetting have been inaccurately called a Muslim ban

This juvenile reluctance to accept competing ideas within the collegiate environment should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with academic culture.

University of North Texas professor George Yancey admits, “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black. But inside academia I face more problems as a [conservative] Christian, and it is not even close.”

Yancey, as a leading scholar in the field of sociology, felt the need to reinforce his suspicions with a study, the results of which demonstrate that nearly one-third of academia would be unwilling to hire or even support a conservative job applicant. Perhaps this is part of the reason that only six percent of professors in the humanities department admit to being conservative, and a mere two percent of English professors lean decidedly to the right. Compared to these paltry sums, 18 percent of educators profess to being Marxist. Not democratic. Not liberal–but Marxist.

It was in this hostile environment that Vanderbilt University law professor Carol Swain made the mistake of speaking out against Islam. Following the Al-Qaeda attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Swain noted that “Islam is a dangerous set of beliefs totally incompatible with Western beliefs concerning freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association.”

This observation, written and explained in an op-ed in the Tennessean newspaper, earned Swain a student protest demanding her termination at Vanderbilt, as well as verbal and sexual threats communicated on campus and in her mailbox.

Higher education in America is an overwhelmingly socialist institution that has made strange bedfellows with political Islam. If the professors discussing postcolonialism come from radical backgrounds, the curriculum they teach is even more hostile to the public good.

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]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/truth-academic-jihad-professorate/feed/8http://crusadeoftruth.com/truth-academic-jihad-professorate/Jihad World: summer camp for terrorist tykeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/K3tUmrH2JBo/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/jihad-world/#commentsMon, 12 Dec 2016 05:21:01 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=317Welcome to George Washington University, where students recently walked out of their classrooms in defiance of immigration laws, and young

]]>Welcome to George Washington University, where students recently walked out of their classrooms in defiance of immigration laws, and young adults voiced their disgust for final exams, paying back student loans, and underage drinking laws. They would like to see their campus transformed into a Safe Space–on crack.

One student complained, “School’s been really stressful, especially after the Trump election. Like, it’s really hard to focus on your studies when, like, there’s so much else going on. Like, there’s all this media being pushed at you, all these, like, things that are being pushed at you, and it’s kind of hard to concentrate, so…”

On September 24, 2016, the Iranian news agency Raja News, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), published an interview with Child and the Future Cultural Center director Hamid Sadeghi about an event held during the second half of September that is a military-religious amusement park, called The City of Games for Revolutionary Children. Sadeghi, who operates under the aegis of the Mashhad municipality and also runs the Sharbehesht.ir website, said that his center had set up and inaugurated the City of Games park, and that it is open free of charge to children aged eight through 13. It should be noted that this is the second City of Games event held by the Mashhad municipality; the first was last summer (see MEMRI Special Dispatches – No. 6098, Revolutionary, Anti-West Indoctrination Of Children By Municipality Of Mashhad, Iran, July 08, 2015)….

“Cultural Center director Hamid Sadeghi: “The City of Games for Revolutionary Children [park was opened] at Mashhad’s Kooh Sangi Park by the Child and the Future Cultural Center organization. It will be open September 18 to September 28, and children aged eight to 13 will be admitted free. At the City of Games, we are trying to convey to the children messages about fighting, the Holy Defense [i.e. Iran-Iraq War] and current global issues, through games, amusements, and group activities.

“After registering, the children enter the City of Games compound and split up into groups of eight to 10. They don uniforms and go through 12 [activity] stations.

“One of [our] cultural experts guides the children at the City of Games. First they are brought into the stations of the Ghadir [Shi’ite holiday honoring Imam ‘Ali’s succession to the Prophet Muhammad] and of the Lovers of Ahl Al-Bayt [the family of the Prophet Muhammad descended from ‘Ali], and [the guide] explains to them about the Mahdi [the Shi’ite messiah]. Then they reach the station of the Rule of the Jurisprudent [Velayat-e Faqih], and then the station of the Revolution, where the guide explains about the Islamic Revolution and how the Iranian nation vanquished the [Shah’s] dictatorship. An explanation is also provided about the directives of the Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini and [Supreme] Leader Khamenei. Each group of children is assigned a commander who must be obeyed.

“Next, the children enter the first station of the Holy Defense, which houses the dome of the Tomb of Imam Reza [the eighth imam]. Like the fighters during the eight years of the Holy Defense, the children take leave of the Imam Reza and set out for the [battle]fronts.

“The children follow various paths simulating fighting the enemy, and at some places, the children learn about simple [combat] methods such as firing plastic artillery shells at a simulated enemy as well as aiming and firing a rifle with plastic bullets at [an effigy] of Netanyahu and at U.S. and Israeli flags. Here the guide tells the children a story about some of the operations that were carried out during the eight years of the Holy Defense.

“[After] the children are victorious in the war, they enter the station of the defense of the Shrine of Zaynab [the granddaughter of Muhammad and the daughter of ‘Ali, who according to Shi’ite tradition is buried in Damascus] and learn about defending the holy places, about the fighting in Syria against ISIS, and about anti-ISIS thought. At this stage, the children are tasked with finding bullets, each of which have a single letter written on it, and then play a game to complete sentences according to the guide’s instructions. That is, the guide asks a question and the children have to find letters and make words and sentences out of them to answer his question.

“After that, the children have a contest throwing balls at effigies of ISIS and the Saudi royal family, and finish the station [activity] in triumph. Next they enter an area simulating the Shrine of Zaynab, and watch a video on the defense of the shrine. Finally, they receive a cultural souvenir gift, and then they enter the final stage.

“At the final station, the children learn that the most important element[s] for attaining victory are wisdom and intelligence for fighting the enemy.

“At this station, the children are blindfolded and asked to throw a ball at an Israeli flag in the form of a puzzle and knock it down, and then to assemble a puzzle of an Iranian flag….

This is not the first time Iranians have turned play time into killing time. The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah spent two years developing a first person shooter style video game called Special Force (apparently, there is just one). The game replicates actual Hezbollah terrorist missions against the Israeli state, turning religiously inspired genocide into good old-fashioned family fun.

Terrorist takes aim at an Israeli settlement filled with women and children in Special Force.

In another popular, retro-style game from Iran called “Missile Strike,” players must guide a weapon of mass destruction towards an Israeli city. The Supreme Leader of Iran provides encouragement during a loading screen: “The leaders of [Israel] threaten us with military action. But I think most of them know — and if they don’t, they should — that if they lay a finger on us, the Islamic Republic of Iran will raze them to the ground.”

When the payload arrives close to its target, players must take aim for a Star of David at the city center.

The developer of “Missile Strike” Mehdi Atash Jaam sees no issue with a game where the objective to is bomb innocent civilians, or–stated plainly, to kill Jews. “The reason we explicitly depict an attack on Israel in this game is that they too are explicitly depicting [attacks], in ‘Battlefield [3]’ for instance.”

Jaam must be referring to a U.S.-Israeli alliance, because neither the publisher nor developer are based in Israel. Tehran has banned “Battlefield 3” in their country for the depicted invasion of their capital, a move that the game’s distributors find humorous.

“In that ‘Battlefield 3’ is not available for purchase in Iran, we can only hope the ban will help prevent pirated copies reaching consumers there,” Electronic Arts commented after the ban.

While video games in America and other Western nations receive ratings similar to those used with motion pictures to notify parents of objectionable material, games in Iran are marked with a holographic sticker that indicates Islamic approval. Iranian authorities also use the stickers to give local game developers an edge against foreign games that are both higher quality and priced at under $2. So while an American-made soccer video game would not receive the sticker, the ultra genocidal “Attack on Tel-Aviv” would.

Iranians have no qualms with sending their young to battle. During the eight years of human rights tragedies that made up the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian nation sent preteen boys into minefields to clear the way for the armed, adult soldiers behind them. Boys were instructed to poke at or jump on mines.

Back in America…

An eight-year-old Florida boy was suspended from Harmony Community School for pointing his finger in the form of an imaginary firearm while playing “Cops and Robber.”

An off-duty police officer who showed up at Entz Elementary School in Mesa, Arizona to pick up his child was asked by the principal to change out of his police uniform during future visits. The request came after parents complained that their children were frightened by the presence of an armed officer.

A high school student in Georgia was arrested and charged with a felony when police found a filet knife meant to clean fish in the student’s tackle box. The knife was discovered in the 17-year-old’s car after police dogs alerted officers to the presence of a single, leftover firecracker from the Fourth of July. The filet knife, which was subsequently discover, threatens the student’s dream of entering the Air Force after school.

Two Virginia boys, waiting for the school bus from their front yard, engaged in a hasty battle with airsoft rifles. Both were suspended for the rest of the year.

While soft-skinned American men run off to their Safe Spaces, and American youth are scolded for their weaponized imaginations, miniature Islamofascists are gaming the demise of the West.

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/jihad-world/feed/3http://crusadeoftruth.com/jihad-world/Tipping the Big Club over a cliffhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/kNyO5uf9ZfU/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/big-club/#respondThu, 08 Dec 2016 17:35:29 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=310Ben Garrison exposes the Big Club, a consortium of bankers, politicians, and financial parasites that have run the country since

]]>Ben Garrison exposes the Big Club, a consortium of bankers, politicians, and financial parasites that have run the country since the rise of the Federal Reserve. While President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a strong desire to reform this system, some recent appointments by the future president appear counter to this endeavor.

Whatever the future of Trump’s economic policies, he faces the immediate challenge of dislocating a deeply entrenched system of patronage and clientelism. The last president to wage war with the wealthy elite was George W. Bush, and in 2008 alone he tried 17 times to reform government-sponsored enterprises within the housing industry. Throughout the duration of his tenure, President Bush warned Congress about the dangers facing the housing industry, and he sought to maneuver Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to insulate them from the risks facing the financial marketplace.

Bush’s numerous warnings went unheeded, though, and a global recession followed. The same banks and businesses that wrought the policies that allowed such a devastating collapse were bailed out by the government. And many of the same congressional actors that sponsored such corruption continue to occupy their legislative seats of power. The Big Club remained.

Trump has promised to “drain the swamp” and use his presidential leverage to disband the Big Club–once and for all.

Ben Garrison illustrates this by using both words and images with another one of his brilliant editorial cartoons:

George Carlin once famously joked, “It’s a Big Club. And YOU ain’t in it! You and I are not in the big club….”

Only he wasn’t joking. The ‘Big Club’ exists and they are unaccountable to the people outside of it. This private club of globalists came about because we allowed them to control our system of money. At first it was the Rothschilds who gained control of the banking houses of Europe. This notorious family funded both sides of wars and cleaned up. They funded governments and ended up controlling those governments. They tried to do the same for America. Alexander Hamilton was a stooge for European banking interests. He helped set up the first central bank to control our nation’s money. Andrew Jackson spent two terms throwing out the Rothschild snakes, and he succeeded. But the central bankers were persistent. We got the Federal Reserve foisted upon us in 1913 and the globalist bankers once again were in control. As a nation, we got poorer while we were saddled with endless war. To be sure, the very top of the pyramid continues to get stupendously richer, but that’s by design.

And now we have Trump. He was elected to drain the swamp. He may be our last hope to tip the Big Club over a cliff. He has expressed some interest in auditing the Federal Reserve. This is the first step in exposing their rampant corruption. First audit the Fed, then end the Fed. Trump also wants to bring good paying jobs back to America and close the wide open borders. The Big Club doesn’t want this.
Unfortunately Trump appointed Mnuchin, an ex-Goldman Sachs executive, as Secretary of Treasury. More ominously, Mnuchin once partnered with Soros. I would much rather have seen Ron Paul become Treasury Secretary, but perhaps Trump wants a few insiders in his cabinet in order to better deal with the powers that be. Trump said Mnuchin made some ‘amazing deals.’ Fine—as long as he’s willing to deal We The People in this time.

Maybe Trump wants such insiders because they know where the bodies are buried. That way he can better expose them. Can Mnuchin help bring back Glass Steagall and end the Big Club’s stranglehold on us? It remains to be seen, but if Trump continues to dine with Romney and others from the Big Club—and then does does their bidding, his feet will need to be held to the fire. Right now we can only hope that he is playing them off against one another.

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/big-club/feed/0http://crusadeoftruth.com/big-club/Liberals continue to parade hate crime victims, blame Trumphttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/PQKMkkLH3U0/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/liberal-hate-parade/#respondThu, 08 Dec 2016 12:37:51 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=301When you think of a hate crime, what is the first image that comes to mind? Probably something like this?

The Huffington Post defines “colorblind racism” as denying racism in any way or attributing inequities to anything but racism.

What if one citizen tells another citizen (or non-citizen) to “go back to your country,” as 36 year-old Christopher Nelson demanded of an off-duty police woman in Brooklyn, New York?

Nelson was arrested on Sunday and charged with felony menacing and aggravated harassment.

So moved by this incident was New York City mayor Bill De Blasio that he found cause to parade this police officer-who was off duty at the time of the incident-before reporters and cameras and cite a direct correlation between President-elect Donald Trump and a rise in his city’s reports of hate crimes.

If allegations of other threats made by Nelson during the altercation are true, then some Americans may agree that this was, in fact, a hate crime. But to associate these words spoken in anger with some sort of Trump-inspired hate is to politicize the issue and cheapen it.

Mayor De Blasio is less concerned with reports of actual beatings within his city–crimes that do not require a leap of faith to tie to politics or to find motivated by hate. In November, Corey Cataldo of the Bronx was riding the number five train uptown from Union Square when another passenger began choking him for wearing a hat with the Trump slogan emblazoned upon it.

“He asked me if I’m a Trump supporter. I said ‘yeah,’ and thought he’d say ‘me too.’ People have been doing that,” Cataldo said. “But no. This man was not a Trump supporter.”

Other bystanders watched as Cataldo struggled against his determined attacker before finally breaking free and alerting authorities.

There was no press conference held by De Blasio for this horrific assault.

The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a controversial Muslim rights group with strong links to international terrorism, was quick to capitalize on the drama by making an official statement:

“While Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo both have publicly stated that hate has no place in New York, the number of bias-related attacks continues to climb. President-elect Trump must forcefully and repeatedly address the ugly hatred growing rampant through-out our nation. His rhetoric encouraged hate, racism and xenophobia, and innocent people are being assaulted across our country as a result.”

CAIR receives their legitimacy from hate crime reports, aggressively soliciting their constituents for any perceived instances of disrespect. Their efforts are paying off in New York, as U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), along with Sens. Robert Menendez and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) are pushing for a bill that will provide million of dollars to fund the protection of mosques and non-profits.

CAIR reports of hate crimes are cited by the same Washington lawmakers that have promised to fund Muslim nonprofits. CAIR is a Muslim nonprofit. The conflict of interests is criminal.

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/liberal-hate-parade/feed/0http://crusadeoftruth.com/liberal-hate-parade/Meme Busters: was America founded as a Christian nation?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/j791VNpxBbw/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/meme-busters-was-america-founded-as-a-christian-nation/#commentsWed, 07 Dec 2016 15:48:10 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=294Many of the citizens of the original thirteen colonies, or their pioneering forebears, fled religious persecution in Europe. As a

]]>Many of the citizens of the original thirteen colonies, or their pioneering forebears, fled religious persecution in Europe. As a consequence, America’s Founding Fathers believed strongly in a separation of church and state. But what did this mean for early Americans insofar as the government and Christian worship were concerned? More precisely for judging the accuracy of this meme, what did the Framers say in this regard?

The Founding Fathers were mostly concerned with preventing any one Christian sect from dominating another. They wished to avoid the centuries of religious warfare that wracked mainland Europe, pitting Protestants against Catholics, or Baptists against Quakers. University of Delaware professor Christine Leigh Heyrman explains this history:

Those steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment were determined to ensure that the religious wars which had wracked Europe would not engulf the new republic and that its clergy and churches would not acquire the wealth and influence which would enable them to play a prominent role in civil government. At the same time, many Americans who cleaved to Christian orthodoxy—especially those who dissented from former or current religious establishments—were determined to ensure that no denomination would enjoy the unfair advantage of government support.

In the 18th century, America was dominated by protestants of many different sects. There was a genuine fear that any measures taken to stifle religion from public life would result in the rise of foreign, unfamiliar religions. Heyrman explains:

Anti-Federalist critics of the proposed Constitution warned that abolishing religious tests would allow Jews, Catholics, and Quakers—even “pagans, deists, and Mahometans [Muslims]”—to hold federal office, perhaps even to dominate the new national government. And many evangelical religious leaders, like the group of Presbyterian elders who took their concerns to George Washington in 1789, objected that the Constitution failed to acknowledge “the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent.” (Washington evenly replied, “The path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”)

Remember that America experimented with the Articles of Confederation for over a decade before adopting the Constitution in 1789. During this time, many states mandated religious tests and levied taxes in order to support local Christian churches. Once again, Heyrman explains:

The first challenge loomed with the meeting of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in the spring of 1787. At that time, nearly all state constitutions required office-holders to swear to their belief in either the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments or the truth of Protestant Christianity, and one-third of the states still levied taxes to support Christian churches. Yet the delegates at Philadelphia wished to avoid protracted controversy over religious matters—which, in any case, most believed should be left to the states—and hoped to reach consensus on the Constitution as quickly as possible. So the Convention spent little time debating the proposed Constitution’s two brief provisions regarding religion, one (in deference to the Quakers) allowing those assuming federal posts to “affirm” rather than to swear an oath of office, the other barring religious tests for those officeholders. More surprisingly, none of the delegates objected that the proposed Constitution did not refer to God. That omission marked a departure from the founding documents of 1776: the Declaration of Independence invokes the “Creator” in setting forth the basis of human rights and the Articles of Confederation alludes to the “Great Governor of the World.”

The separation of church and state, pursued with such vehement energy in contemporary America, meant something entirely different in the 18th century. Indeed, Heyrman elaborates on the Founder’s belief in applying religion to civic life.

Designating the appropriate role of religion in the early republic’s civic life also presented a challenge. Most of the Founders believed that religion would promote public morality, which in turn would strengthen both republican society and government in the United States. That being the case, what constituted an appropriate inclusion of religious ideas and rituals in the conduct of civic life? In wrestling with that question, presidents from Washington to Madison played a delicate game of brinksmanship [sic]. All of them strove to keep religion from becoming the fodder for controversy by affirming that expressions of spirituality had a legitimate place in the public square while also upholding what they regarded as a due separation between church and state.

In their efforts to strike the right balance, George Washington and John Adams proclaimed national days of thanksgiving and fasting during their administrations and voiced no objections to the appointment of salaried Congressional chaplains, who opened legislative sessions with prayers. In their public addresses, too, they often expressed confidence in the power of divine providence to guide the new republic.

It is just as easy to prove that the Founding Fathers believed that they were giving rise to a Christian by reading their recorded words on the subject.

John Adams

Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. . . . What a Eutopia – what a Paradise would this region be.

The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.

John Quincy Adams

My hopes of a future life are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ…

In the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior. The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity

Samuel Adams

I conceive we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the Supreme Ruler of the world . . . that the confusions that are and have been among the nations may be overruled by the promoting and speedily bringing in the holy and happy period when the kingdoms of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be everywhere established, and the people willingly bow to the scepter of Him who is the Prince of Peace.

John Hancock

Sensible of the importance of Christian piety and virtue to the order and happiness of a state, I cannot but earnestly commend to you every measure for their support and encouragement.

Patrick Henry

Righteousness alone can exalt [America] as a nation…Whoever thou art, remember this; and in thy sphere practice virtue thyself, and encourage it in others.

John Jay

Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation, to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.

Jedidiah Morse

In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation… in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom… Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government – and all the blessings which flow from them – must fall with them

Caleb Strong, called upon the people of Massachusetts to pray that:

. . . all nations may know and be obedient to that grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ.

Given the weight of the evidence gathered during this quest for Truth, it is safe to say that this meme is…

BUSTED!!!

And this evidence very clearly discredits these:

BUSTED! BUSTED! BUSTED!

]]>http://crusadeoftruth.com/meme-busters-was-america-founded-as-a-christian-nation/feed/1http://crusadeoftruth.com/meme-busters-was-america-founded-as-a-christian-nation/Ohio State faculty ignore terror threats, focus on Muslim hate crimeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/crusadeoftruth/truthfeeder/~3/wNkvAUGFzww/
http://crusadeoftruth.com/ohio-state-terror/#respondMon, 28 Nov 2016 22:15:48 +0000http://crusadeoftruth.com/?p=270Columbus, Ohio: A 20-year old has been identified as the slain suspect in a bizarre knife and vehicle assault on

Columbus, Ohio: A 20-year old has been identified as the slain suspect in a bizarre knife and vehicle assault on the Ohio State University campus. He is a Somalian refugee and Ohio State University student named Abdul Razak Ali Artan. Nine people were injured with non-life threatening injuries, although one is said to be in critical condition. The knife attack follows statements from university and city leaders condemning Muslim hate crimes on campus.

Dr. Andrew Thomas of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center describes the injuries as “lacerations” from the knife attack and “soft tissue injuries” caused when the Somalian refugee ran over several students gathered outside an educational facility. He says that two victims have already undergone surgery to treat their injuries.

After a fire alarm was triggered from a faulty sensor at Watts Hall, a chemical engineering department, students and faculty evacuated the building around 10am. Eyewitnesses state that this is when the assault began, first when a vehicle drove over a curb and struck students. Ali Artan then exited the car and used what Columbus Police Department officials describe as a “butcher knife” to attack more victims.

Ohio State University President Michael Drake praised the actions of students and police that responded to the attack. Students were advised during the attack to “RUN HIDE FIGHT” via social media. This message corresponds with OSU’s protocol for responding to an active attacker, described on their Department of Public Safety website.

Columbus Police Chief Kimberly Jacobs acknowledged that the attack could be a terrorist plot, referencing another February assault in which a Somalian man used a machete to attack his victims

Columbus resident and Somalian Mohamad Barry used a large blade to attack customers of the Nazareth restaurant whom he believed were Jewish. Barry inquired as to the descent of the restaurant owner, and later returned with a machete and assaulted four customers after he learned that the owner was from Israel.

A 33-year old Algerian immigrant was responsible for a machete attack in Belgium that left two police officers seriously injured in August, and one month earlier a similar attack from a Muslim migrant using a large blade inside of a German train car left 20 injured.

The attacks at Ohio State and elsewhere with machetes and vehicles may be in response to a 2014 order from Islamic State leaders: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him…”

Despite the great potential for a jihad-like attack in Columbus, a city that has recently seen an influx of Muslim migrants, the Columbus City Council and the Ohio State University have chosen instead to highlight relatively infrequent and uncorroborated claims of hate crimes against Muslims.

Crusade of Truth, writing for Jihad Watch, recently reported on the Columbus organizations that either sided with or opposed the Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group with ties to Middle Eastern terrorism. CAIR actively seeks out reports of hate crimes against Muslims, and they have promoted multiple allegations of hate crimes that were later proven to be fabricated.

CAIR does not redact allegations that are later proven to be falsified.

Ohio State’s president responded to CAIR reports that attacks against Muslims have increased since Donald Trump was elected President. In an open letter signed by nine other faculty members, Drake wrote, “”Over these past few days, we have heard deeply disturbing reports of verbal assaults on students and others at a wide range of institutions, from middle schools to universities across the country, including our own campus.”

Good morning everyone! This is just a reminder to stay safe and look out for your fellow brothers and sisters pic.twitter.com/WM4YaDOCyi

Drake continued by identifying OSU as a safe place for all nationalities, races and religions. “We pride ourselves on being an inclusive, welcoming and ultimately safe place for people and ideas from all corners of our society and all around the world,” Drake wrote. “It is in fact the collective sum of our experiences and backgrounds that makes us so strong.”

For the nine victims of the Somalian refugee’s bloody rampage, OSU was neither safe nor inclusive to them. Their university allied itself with a controversial organization, one to which the FBI and the Columbus Police have refused to work, and one in which the United Arab Emirates has declared a terrorist organization.

Chris Gaubatz, an undercover national security consultant that infiltrated CAIR, had this to say of Ohio State’s new Islamic partner in a testimony before the U.S. Senate: “During my time conducting undercover research as an intern for Hamas, both at CAIR Maryland/Virginia in Herndon, Virginia, and CAIR-National in Washington DC, I preserved documents that revealed Hamas doing business as CAIR: [CAIR] conspired to cover-up fraud committed by one of their immigration attorneys; discussed coordinating with Bin Laden and his associates; placed staffers and interns inside congressional offices -conspired to influence congress, specifically judiciary, intelligence, and homeland security committees; impacted congressional districts, tasking each Hamas Chapter office with influencing at least two legislators.”

CAIR-Columbus has scheduled live remarks on Ali Arten’s assault at 6pm EST. Some will not be convinced by their expected condemnation of the attack:

CAIR/Hamas (a terrorist organization) will "condemn" the The Ohio State University attacks in 3…2…1….

While it may never be known whether or not the Somalian attacker was agitated by the claims of CAIR and President Drake. specifically that Muslims were being assaulted on campus, Ohio State officials should carefully investigate claims of hate crimes made by CAIR before publicly denouncing them. Drake’s open letter was in response to two reports made by CAIR that Muslim women were threatened by lone men on OSU campus. While CAIR and Ohio State have aggressively publicized these events, neither allegations were reported to local police for an in-depth investigation.

Additionally, Ohio State has failed to identify the potential for Muslim terrorist attacks on campus, especially considering past attacks in the city. In addition to the February 2016 machete attack, local Somalian immigrant Nuradin Abdi was indicted in 2004 for plotting to blow up an area shopping mall.

An ISIS magazine recently published an article encouraging its adherents in the West to engage in lone wolf attacks, and to use a car as a weapon against people before using a different weapon to attack more victims.

Ohio State officials chose not to focus on the very real dangers of terrorism to their students and staff. Instead, Drake and nine other OSU leaders chose to highlight two unproven claims of hate crimes made by an organization widely condemned by both national and international entities. The results are not surprising.